Hisham Matar's book A Month in Siena is a beautiful volume that speaks of memory, loss, art, and finally some qualified hope.
Towards the end of the book, as he looks at Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, painted around 1445, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum. The painting shows pairs (and one trio) of individuals greeting each other, as if from a long absence or journey. Matar writes:
What is it for the dead to remember the living, I wondered, to still be able to recognize those we knew when the soul was flesh . . .
That must surely be the ambition of every reunion, not only to identify and be identified, but also to have an accurate account of al that has come since the last encounter. And it must surely follow that what lies behind our longing and nostalgia is exactly this need to be accounted for. . . . We want to be seen by [those closest to us] and, in turn, rediscover our own powers of remembrance, and finally to find the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape. The painting understands this. It knows that what we wish for most, even more than paradise, is to be recognized; that regardless of how transformed and transfigured we might be by the passage, something of us might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent so long loving. Perhaps the entire history of art is the unfolding of this ambition: that every book, painting, or symphony is an attempt to give a faithful account for all that concerns us.
Is that not the power of an education, even an education in the liberal arts, to attempt to give that faithful account? Is not the deep knowledge of the liberal arts the felt-and-touched experience of being seen by works of art, buildings, texts of all kinds, music, the biological world, the realm of physics? That something might sustain and remain perceptible to those we have spent to long loving.
Is this not exactly why an education in the liberal arts can never be marketed, and in the commodified space of the self as defined by neoliberal capitalism, so impossible to sell?