Immanuel Can recently posted on the subject of the
meaning of freedom, which puts me in mind of a passage from Chesterton that I happened
to read today:
“It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and
limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you
draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative
way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will
really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into
the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from
alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may,
if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from
being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break
out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three
sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called ‘The
Loves of the Triangles’; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever
were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case
with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of
pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the THING he is
doing.”
— G.K. Chesterton,
Orthodoxy
Originally published in 1908. Entirely relevant.
That
’s the funny thing about truth ...