Frances Middendorf

“However valuable journals and other autobiographical writings may be for illuminating the range and depth and richness of experiences of happiness and unhappiness, it is to works of art that we must turn to see them more fully. Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher (and herself a lifelong journal-keeper) points to the importance of learning to pay attention to deep areas of sensibility and creative imagination, removal from one state of mind to another, shifts of attachments, and love and respect for the contingent details of the world in order to deepen and enrich our understanding of what people say about their lives. 30 But art, she holds, can carry that process still further, enlarging people’s sensibility, allowing them to transcend their limitations, and exhibiting to them “the connection, in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion”:”
― Sissela Bok, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science