The Artist in the World

Bonnie Marranca

In a moving retelling of her trip to Stockholm to perform at the 2016 Nobel

Prize ceremony (纽约客, 十二月 14), Patti Smith details preparations
for her appearance on the morning of the event. Rehearsal with the orchestra.
Tea and warm soup in her dressing room. She thought of her mother who first
bought her a Bob Dylan album, when she was sixteen or so. Her favorite song was
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” She played it over and over then, and performed it
in the years to come with her late husband. Now she was to sing the celebrated
song at the Award presentation, before the King and Queen, many well-dressed
guests, and Nobel laureates. But not Bob Dylan, winner of the literary prize this
年. Smith thought of past honorees in Literature, 尤其, Hermann Hesse,
Thomas Mann, Albert Camus.

What happened next, I imagine, is a fear of every performer. Smith was so over-
taken by the emotions of the moment and personal memories drifting through
the song, that she was stopped short by extreme nervousness, unable momen-
tarily to continue. She apologized and started over. It was not that she forgot the
words but that they simply wouldn’t come out. Over the course of this eventful
day and the next Smith pondered the meaning of her stumble. She understood
the nature of commitment to the work. She realized that her life inhabited the
world of the lyrics. Remorse transformed into acceptance and joy in the process
of being human.

My thoughts turned to another Nobel Prize-winner, someone Patti Smith had
mentioned in her article—Albert Camus. 他的 1957 acceptance speech, 这
magisterially titled “Create Dangerously,” was written in a Europe rebuilding
itself after a devastating war. Admonishing ideologies of the right and the left,
he turned to the subject of beauty as an inner ideal of freedom that unites the
human race. In his reasoning, the artist can neither turn away from the world
nor become lost in it.

PAJ 115 (2017), PP. 1–2. 

土井:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00358

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Just as Patti Smith had concluded that art is for the “transformation of the
人们,” and that everything in the world she ever experienced became a part
of her to be called forth at any moment, so Camus believed that every human
being participates in the building of the world for others. Freedom of art is tied
to risk. On this occasion, reading and thinking of the two, 一起, affirms the
nobility of artists who search for authenticity in their very public expression that
belies a solemn privacy.

The heroic, humanistic truths of Camus bear recalling:

Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves.
Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of
empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life
and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; 其他的, in a man.
I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of
solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers
and the crudest implications of history.

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