From page 170 of Paul Auster’s novel, Moon Palace, which I’ve been reading at a rate of perhaps five pages a day:
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The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.
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