‘What is it in us—what urge to lose ourselves in the otherness of things—that leads us so insistently to seek out encounters with paintings, plays, poems, novels, works of sculpture, dance, music?’ asks the Australian author David Malouf in his essay ‘Questions on the Way to the Exhibition’.

This essay appears in Being There, the third in a series of books published to mark Malouf”s 80th birthday in 2014. The book contains musings, addresses and libretti and is riddled with fascinating aesthetic questions and quotes about art, music and architecture.

I reviewed the first in the series A First Place late last year.

Malouf’s incisive mind ranges across subjects as disparate as Hollywood stardom, Glenn Murcutt’s architecture, Verdi’s operas, Jim Henson’s photographs and more.

‘South’ is a diamond in a collection packed with beauty. It ponders ‘the south that Goethe was in touch with when he tapped his poems out on the shoulder of the girl he had just spent the night with. The naked south. The classical south. The pagan south. That south of the spirit, at the furthest pole from Brisbane or Dundee, where the body rules—that ideal state we call “Italy”.’

Read Malouf and be inspired to lose yourself in otherness; to engage deeply with artistic endeavour as maker or audience. Know being there is (partly) what it takes.

Being There
David Malouf
Random House, $29.99

PS: July is Microlit month over at Spineless Wonders Publishing #‎MicrolitMonth and I’m travelling (Copenhagen today)—so all my posts this month will be short and sweet (around 250 words).