It can be painful to realize that we can’t turn back time. As I was going away to college, I remember thinking, “So that was high school.” And then, turning twenty: “So those were the teenage years.” Sometimes it hits me that those are years I’m never getting back. By no means do I miss them, but I also know that I didn’t make of them what I might have.
Weeks before coming to Hillsdale, I watched the movie “Boyhood” and I saw exactly what I described above play out. The movie delivers an image of growing up by following a boy named Mason and his family over the course of twelve years. His mother drives his life as she travels through relationships and homes. As a kid I hated the feeling that I wasn’t in control of my destiny, and I hated it for Mason. Near the end, as Mason goes to college, his mom realizes “this is it.” She looks back over her life and cries, saying, “I just thought there would be more.”
She said it so well. While ambiguous, her choice of the word ‘more’ was simple and relatable. When we’re young, we hold the notion that life always offers fulfillment if we look in the right places. It’s the thought that the life we crave is at the end of the next path. But eventually we go down enough roads either to realize we’ll never find it, or to find ourselves a slave to our desire. So what do we do when this finally hits us? Often we try and bury the knowledge of it or run from it, even if we don’t admit that’s what we’re doing.
Yet the darkness we hide from is immovable. There is no undoing what has been done. And when you come to suffering in life there are only two options. You can pretend the cave isn’t in front of you and make your home in the doorway, or you can go inside and come out the other end.
This is a place where art, approached properly, can come through in an unexpected way. We often tend to label artists who talk about pain as ‘angsty’. But some problems do not go away until they’re addressed.
Art is no sedative. Rather, art is valuable precisely because it reveals the way things really are. It tells us the things we don’t want to hear, which are sometimes exactly the things we need to hear most: things to experience and be transformed by. We abuse art when we approach it as an opiate, a blinder which enables us to ignore our problems. Art is useless that helps us pretend life is okay when it isn’t.
Great art uses our own pain to help us see what and where we are. After it brings us into the reality of our situation, it gives us the power to improve by showing what we must accept before we can heal. Even more, art can show us that there are other things to be found in life than what we have experienced by embodying a hope that is more than naive fantasy.
In “Boyhood”’s final moment, Mason has passed into this place. We can feel it as he gazes across the desert, sitting next to a new friend. His friend comments that it isn’t up to them to seize the moment because the moment seizes them. Mason replies, “Yeah, I know, it’s constant, the moments… it’s like it’s always right now.” The comments highlight the reason we turn to the kind of art that drives us from self-deception. We’re not in control of the world, but art can help us choose how to face it.
Andrew Kern is a freshman from Charlotte, North Carolina. He plans to major in philosophy and minor in journalism. He loves Lana Del Rey very much.
