艺术以疗愈 - 微笑

“它这么美好，但是为什么让我们想哭呢？” 处女和孩子，1927年前，Sainte-Chapelle 

（处女的脸庞）是一张欢迎的脸庞 --这表情是我们一直希望得到的:别人毫无保留地因见到我们而高兴。让我们想起这样的微笑有多么难得，别人的，或我们自己的。

（她善意地看着这个娃娃）这种幽默包容你，而不是取笑你。

她的美让人产生许多复杂的感情。一方面，我们很高兴感受到生活应该是什么样的；而另一方面，我们也伤心地认识到，生活经常都不是这样的。

也许我们会因这世上所有无邪的丢失而隐隐作痛。

美竟可以让丑陋的现实更加难以忍受。

节选自《艺术以疗愈》, Radha 翻译

"It's sweet, but why might it also make us tearful?" Virgin and Child, before 1279 by Sainte-Chapelle

It is a face of welcome - the kind of look we hope to receive when someone is unreservedly glad to see us. It may remind us how rarely we have met with, or bestowed, such a smile.

It is the sort of humour that will include you, rather than mock you.

Her beauty can give us to mixed emotions. On the one hand, we are delighted by an awareness of how life should more often be; on the other, we are pained by an acute sense that our own life is not usually like this.

Perhaps we feel an ache of tenderness of all the lost innocence of the world.

Beauty can make the actual ugliness of existence all the harder to bear.

Excerpts from Art as Therapy written by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong