The possibility of being surprised, hooked, so to speak, requires the cultivation of a certain kind of availability. There’s an irony to this: I need to make choices that make it possible, once in a while, for my will and intellect to be bowled over, overwhelmed by an arrival that grabs hold of me. In other words, once I’ve purposely journeyed into unknown territory, sometimes I need to put down the guidebook and simply drift. There might be long seasons of incubation that feel like walking through the same gallery over and over again, unaffected. But that is the discipline of aesthetic availability: training for surprise.
It is this necessary cultivation for surprise that is undermined by the cliché. The arts in the vicinity of faith seem especially prone to give us what we already love, to keep returning to tropes that are familiar, hence comforting. This is how to make the world smaller, shrinking it to the size of what I’ve come looking for, what I’ve come to expect. The comfort of the cliché is a buffer against surprise. …
A life hungry for aesthetic surprise does not settle for daily doses of predictably poignant comfort; instead, I need to expose my palate to strange, maybe even unsavory tastes as a way of making myself available for the sublime. While we can’t manufacture the surprise, we can learn to make ourselves available. …
Granted, there’s an objective force to works of art that can do this. It’s no accident that Bach and Cézanne hook so many. The mystery is what it takes for them to hook me. What did I have to go through for the epiphany to dawn, for the artwork to arrest me, unsettle me?