The Message of Art: “Pay Attention!”

From Frederick Buechner’s  Listening to Your Life :

From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that dwells therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

. . . Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, and to our own lives, as a vastly deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places where we can speak to each other of holy things.