The Artist on the Eve of his Death

Nathaniel went to the artist, an ancient man in his last days, one of the few who remembered life before the government. The man didn’t like to talk about that for fear of being arrested, but in his last days he had become more open, especially to the boy assigned to care for him. Everyone over sixty had a caretaker. These days, people lived happily well into their nineties. The State provided for everyone.

The artist opened his eyes as Nathaniel came into the room and asked for the good news.

“Nothing you’d want to hear, I’m sure,” Nathaniel answered.

“Oh, there must be something somewhere! A war, a deadly storm, maybe a recession!”

“No, nothing at all, sir.” The boy sighed, and like he did every day, explained how nothing bad had happened in thirty years. Nathaniel loved his work, of course, but some days were better than others.

“How old are you now, twenty?”

“Twenty-six, sir.” Nathaniel put a spoon into the artist’s nutritious soup. Everybody at the center loved it except him. Most days, he would spit it out; today, he just didn’t resist. Nathaniel asked him, “Why is it that you want something bad to happen? Life is perfect. There’s no violence, there’s no poverty…”

“And there’s no beauty!” The artist smashed the tray, surprising the caretaker who dropped the spoon. “Have you even read a book lately?”

“Of course, sir. Knowledge is essential to the proper function of society.”

“Not like that,” he shouted, “I mean literature! Not a book of facts and charts and diagrams, a book with emotions, that makes you feel alive! With heroes, and conflict!”

Nathaniel hadn’t read anything like that. The question was absurd. But he let the artist speak, he doubted the Police would come all the way here for a Level Three Infraction.

“Of course you haven’t, there hasn’t been a story written in thirty years! All feeling is gone! All purpose is gone!”

“But surely you don’t believe that, that we don’t have purpose any more. The State has fixed all of society’s old problems. The world is perfect.”

“My boy, that’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, a perfect world,” the artist said to him, eyes closed, waiting. “In a perfect world, there’s no struggle. No reason to die. And if there’s no reason to die, well, there’s no reason to live.”

The artist would not eat any more. Not today, not the next. In his dreams, he saw fantastic art that the world had forgotten, that no one would see again. Things with meaning and humanity. For a moment, he wondered if he might come back in another form after he died; and then, longer than a moment, he hoped he wouldn’t.