Kunst biedt weerstand. Kunst is niet te reduceren tot een boodschap, tot het begrijpen van woorden alleen.
It’s easier to accept this about the other arts. A dance, a landscape painting — we’re less likely to talk about its message than simply about the feelings it rouses in us. Or music: we know there’s no way to say all a song may mean to us, because the meaning is not so much rational as deeply felt, felt by our emotions and our whole body, and the language of the intellect can’t fully express those understandings. In fact, art itself is our language for expressing the understandings of the heart, the body, and the spirit. Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete. This is as true of literature as it is of dance or music or painting. But because fiction is an art made of words, we tend to think it can be translated into other words without losing anything. So people think a story is just a way of delivering a message. […] I wish, instead of looking for a message when we read a story, we could think, ‘Here’s a door opening on a new world: what will I find there?’ – Ursula K. Le Guin