live life as art

From Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Kappus in Letters to a Young Poet:

 

“Read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism—such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.  Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.  Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”

Life is art.  If we succumb to the age-old temptation to seek approval from the critics (who do not necessarily criticize us—we might get a thumbs up), we betray the one who continues to create us as works of art, who has “made us,” that is poiema (Ephesians 2:10).  We are created to be poems.