David Brooks - Animal Dreams

A gaping wound opens before our eyes; we are witnesses of the fact that great evil continues to be perpetuated, and our first task is merely to measure our participation in it. To be objectors in every respect to whatever particular obligation this world attempts to reduce us.

Andre Breton, Political Position of Todays Art (1935)

Why do we stand in wonder before the great paintings , the great sculptures? What is that aura that we seek, that even in the slightest works can capture and enthral us that emanates from the lines of poetry, that whelms through music, that is part of the atmosphere of novels? Is wonder the best term for it? Critics have wrestled with this question for centuries, resorting to such terms as the sacred, worship, the spiritual, or, rejecting such terms, have found, in that feeling of awe, that yearning, a kind of secular substitute or evidence that art might be a kind of secular substitute.

Certainly it doesnt seem to be rational, this wonder and apprehension, and this, perhaps, is its perpetual appeal. We might, before the work of art, find our mind racing, but the feeling to which I refer is what sets the mind racing, not the racing itself: a stilling, a confounding, something at the tip of the mind, as a word can be at the tip of the tongue, at once so close and so out of reach that it has others writing of depth psychology, infantile states, mourning for some pre-linguistic plenitude. As if we have found in ourselves a deep hole, a chasm. Even if we choose to ignore it, everything, in this place of art, seems to resonate with its presence.

But that is not really where this essay begins. In a more practical sense it starts in Skadarlija, the oldest part of Belgrade , several years ago. I am in the city at an international writers festival, one of a handful of Australians there. One of the others, in his early seventies, is a man Ive not seen for almost twenty years. In the late 1980s he was a sometime drinking companion when the poets gathered at the university Staff Centre on Friday evenings. After our reading at the National Library of Serbia, an early evening event, we go into Skadarlija, to a restaurant with outdoor tables overlooking the cobbled street. Its a place famed for grilled meats. Our hosts, knowing my wife and I are vegetarian , are keen to make sure theres enough on the menu we can eat. Its clear the rest of the group wants to go there, and its hard to be spoilers. We assure them theres always something. Salad. Chips. A plain pasta.

Its twilight, late September, warm, the air and the atmosphere delicious. We are all hungry. We order wine, food, pour a glass, drink as we wait. My wife lights up a cigarette. I think about doing likewise but since none of the others appears to be a smoker (not so: after dinner our hosts