What are you trying to recreate every time you fall in love with a book/film/song?
A question I just can't ever seem to find my answer to.
Every time the credits roll, or the final page turns, or the last chord fades into static, there is a distinct hollow ache. It isn't sadness exactly, it’s more like the sudden drop in temperature when you walk from sunlight into a stone corridor. For days after, we walk around under the heavy sedation of someone else’s universe, desperately scouring our mundane reality for remnants of that specific high. We build digital archives of screenshots, curate playlists that attempt to bottle the atmosphere, and underline sentences until the ink bleeds through the paper, all in a manic attempt to preserve a ghost.
But what is the ghost made of?
Perhaps it is an exercise in emotional archaeology. When we find ourselves consumed by a piece of art, we aren’t merely admiring the creator's craft but are recognizing a displaced fragment of our own interiority. It operates much like the concept of anamnesis, the philosophical idea that true knowledge is not newly acquired, but merely remembered from a past existence. When a story or a melody strikes a devastating chord, it feels less like an introduction and more like a reunion. We are constantly seeking a mirror that reflects the parts of our psyche we haven't yet found the vocabulary to articulate. We want to be known, even if it is by a stranger who wrote a stanza fifty years ago.
Or maybe the pursuit is structural. In art, chaos is curated. Pain is given a symmetrical boundary, tragedy is granted a poetic rhythm, even existential dread is framed neatly within a two hour runtime or a minimalist noir aesthetic. Life, by contrast, is notoriously formless and unforgivingly raw. It does not have a soundtrack to tell us when a chapter is ending, nor does it grant us the grace of a well timed monologue.
When we fall in love with art, we are falling in love with a universe where suffering has a purpose, where silence is deliberate, and where every loose thread eventually tethers to something meaningful. We are trying to recreate that brief, beautiful illusion of order. We crave the safety of a world that has been meticulously designed, a world where even the darkest shadows serve a visual and emotional intent.
Yet, the tragedy of this consumption is its transience. You can never read a book for the first time again. You can loop a song until its syntax loses meaning, but the initial spine chilling vertigo of the first listen is unrecoverable. We become like curators of an empty gallery, collecting the frames but losing the canvas.
So the loop continues. We finish one masterpiece only to immediately begin hunting for the next, hoping the next encounter will finally be the one that stays, the one that bridges the gap between the artifice we love and the reality we occupy.
We return to the search not because we expect an answer, but because the hunt itself is the only place where the ghost feels real, leaving us forever suspended between the panic of an unscripted life and the desperate, beautiful need to find our own reflection in the dark.
But anyway, what do I know?
kianamaiart
pixelskylines
gummygunk
kaledo-art
