Copyright 2000 by Edward Willett

South of Saskatoon on Highway 11, just before you dip into the valley where Mt. Blackstrap rears its not-so-lofty peak, there's a bit of a rise. I've driven over it many times this summer, as I head back and forth to Rosthern to appear in the musical Tent Meeting at the Rosthern Station Arts Centre.

I always enjoy the view from the top of that rise, but this last time was something special.

Clouds cast dark gray shadows along the horizon and obscured most of the sky, but in places they were rent with tears edged silver by the sun. Between two clouds, a shaft of light slanted down onto the prairie, lighting a patch of pale green. Fields and trees spread out beneath this remarkable sky as far as I could see, edging into a pale blue haze in the remote distance.

Looking at this scene in the brief moment I had before the rush of the car took me past it, I felt a strange pang. I wanted to stop the car and walk down off the hill into that landscape. It seemed to offer...everything. Both adventure and rest, both peace and danger. Beauty. Life. It made me smile, and brought a sting of unshed tears to my eyes.

I know this feeling. Maybe you do, too. Through the years, people have written about it. C. S. Lewis called it "joy," and wrote about it in his book Surprised by Joy. You might call it transcendence.

It's the feeling that, just for a moment, you've glimpsed another world; a better world, of which this one is just a poor shadow. It's a feeling of longing--longing to step into that other world, but it's also a feeling of loss, because you cannot, at least not in this life. And the loss and longing are compounded by the fact that the feeling itself does not last. It comes, just for a moment, then it's gone, swallowed up by more mundane concerns like, in my case, passing the slower car in front.

But I think that sense of transcendence, of joy, is what drives the arts. Some art is driven by the need on the part of artists to try to communicate these moments of joy to others. Painters try to capture it with paint, writers use words, composers use notes, singers use their voices, dancers use their bodies. If they can stir that same sense of joy in their audiences, they have succeeded.

Maybe even more art, though, is driven by the desire of artists to create such moments of joy and transcendence for themselves. I've felt it singing--moments of pure joy when the music transports me into a realm where nothing else matters. I've felt it on stage, when everything comes together to make the scene we are playing seem completely and utterly real.

A sculptor, so caught up her work that she doesn't eat for two days, has found an extended moment of transcendence and joy. A painter whose world narrows to brush, palette and canvas has found it. So has a writer whose characters become more real to him than his own family, a potter lost in the swirl of clay on the wheel, a photographer teasing the perfect image out of negative, chemicals and paper.

Very few people become artists of any sort for the money, and those that do are fools. Few even make a full-time living at their art, and fewer still become rich. But the people who are truly driven to become artists do so for other reasons--and chief among them is that search for transcendence, for joy, for that sense of being lifted out of yourself and, for an all-too-brief moment, into a deeper, richer, more satisfying world than the mundane one we inhabit most of the time.

The people who buy, read, listen or look at art in all its forms are searching for the same thing, I believe.

For C. S. Lewis, these moments of joy were glimpses of the perfect world before the Fall, a world the faithful will inhabit after death and the end of the world. You may prefer a less religious explanation.

All I know is that whenever I am fortunate enough to be surprised by joy, as I was yesterday on my drive to Rosthern, it makes me long to find more such moments...and that's what art is for.

Posted March 9, 2004