Arts and Literature
Artistic and literary works often engage with suffering, sometimes at great cost to their creators or performers. The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database offers a list of such works under the categories art, film, literature, and theater. Be it in the tragic, comic or other genres, art and literature offer means to alleviate (and perhaps also exacerbate) suffering, as argued for instance in Harold Schweizer's Suffering and the remedy of art.
This Breughel painting is among those that inspired W.H. Auden's poem Musée des Beaux Arts :
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
(...)
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; (...)
Read more about this topic: Suffering
Famous quotes containing the words arts and/or literature:
“If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world’s inheritance,... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.”
—P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)