Why It’s Important to Appreciate Art

And why I want to write in the first place

This is obviously a huge topic, and I’m not going to do it justice with one brief essay. But I can at least cover what is important to me about art, right here at this point in time. And in doing so I hope to give a proper introduction to myself, Bagel of Everything, and why I’m doing any of this.

It’s really hard to be a human. Understatement of the century, but it’s true. To figure out how we’re supposed to spend our lives, to determine who we are and what our place in the world is, that’s the greatest struggle any of us will face. It’s basically impossible. I don’t know if anyone truly succeeds in understanding these questions. The answer may just be unobtainable. After all, where are we supposed to look for the answer? If there is a God, something I believe in but others don’t, He is defined by being beyond our understanding. We can’t see things from the perspective of God, if we could we would be no different from Him. And for those that don’t believe in a God, looking to the world reveals similarly obscure answers. We can only glean pieces, bounce ideas off of other clueless humans, and generally fumble around in the dark, hoping we’ll stumble on a light.

In either case, if you believe there is something beyond the world or not, I think most people agree that we can only briefly touch on truth. No single human has ever figured it all out. And if we are to believe the ones that say they have, most of their stories end in true understanding after death. The result being that most belief systems leave us resigned to the fact that during our lifetimes we won’t understand everything. We’ll stumble across hints of truth, information and feelings that resonate with some primal part of us, but truth is too distant for us to grasp.

Or at least, that’s how I feel about it right now.

I’m 19. I’ll be 20 in a few months, but for now I haven’t even reached two decades of life on this planet. I’m fully aware that I don’t know shit about life. I have a certain perspective, influenced by the way I was raised, the places I lived as a child, and the people that I have met and left behind throughout my life. I have certain beliefs that I share with some and do not share with others. I am just another human being, far from perfect and only seeing a small piece of the world.

I don’t want to pretend I know better than other people, especially those that have lived longer than me and seen things I may never experience in my life. But I do know one thing. And that is that alongside the influence of people I’ve actually known and places I’ve actually been, my life has been shaped by art. Fiction. Imagination. Worlds and people that don’t exist, that were created by another person like myself but unlike myself. These worlds exist in words on a page, in the performances of actors, in the vibrations that my ears read as sound and music. They are not real and they are more real than my own life, each in turn.

Art is unfathomably important. It is a reminder, a way to overcome that greatest of struggles: the journey towards recognizing that other human beings are just as real as you are. We are so impossibly trapped in our own minds, and that keeps us limited, keeps us from fully understanding the inner worlds of other people. Yet at the same time we have this need to be known, to surround ourselves with others. And I’m sure evolutionary psychologists and other cornballs will contend that that is simply a biological drive that recognizes safety in numbers.

But fuck them.

I choose to believe that there is something out there to be found. Something we will never truly touch, but a destination all the same. A place that we search out and in the process, find ourselves. Find those answers to the questions burning holes at the center of every person’s heart. And I choose to believe that the best way, maybe the only way, to search for that destination is by engaging with others. So I choose to seek out things made by other people, pieces of art made with some intention in mind, that have some feeling inspiring their creation. Even if they’re bad, or tasteless, or I don’t end up connecting to them, I can’t think of a better way to understand other people and the world we all inhabit than by trying it all out anyways.

So that’s what I’m going to do. Bagel of Everything is one reflection of that, a place I can share my journey with appreciating art, and hopefully a place that others can find inspiration to do the same. Because that’s really all I want, at least right now. I haven’t found the answers to my questions yet, but I already know at least part of the destination I’m looking for. I want to leave something, something that can impact other people in the way that I have been impacted by the creations of other people. I want future generations to have a record, I want them to take something from this, even if it’s just that another person, just like them but unlike them, existed once.

A person named Trevor Roy Winder

Welcome, I hope you stick around. And if you don’t, that’s okay too! I’ve found plenty of things I saw and discarded, I didn’t need them in the moment. But I hope you keep looking, and I hope you find what you’re looking for.