This sunday morning my daughter was doing her homework, sitting next to me. While trying to find excuses not to do her actual homework she asked if I liked mathematics. “No”, I said, and with fully risking to offend lots of people I can say that I never had the feeling that mathematics in school were related to getting anything done in real life. “So what do you like” she asked (and she asked that in german with her french accent) and I answered: “English I liked, but mostly Art”. “Art?” she asked further, “but why?”. So I take a piece of scrap paper and draw this.

“What’s this to you?” I asked. She replied “a box with a line inside”. “But what else?”. A mouth, a strip of road, a snake, a window (if you turn it 90°), the horizon, the border of a table..that’s why I like art: As a source of inspiration, a tool to develop an idea or feeling, to share, to kick off a thought process, as the outcome of a thought process which then makes someone else think and so on. I heard twice this weekend that we leave not a lot behind, once from my father who looked back on his working life, once in a movie. Most of the things we do are “in the system”, and as the system is reinventing itself, others take our place and wipe out what we thought would last. But Art. It’s not replacable, not redoable because there is no possibility for re-doing art, only for copying it. But the initial work remains (until someone throws it away like I will do with my paper).

This paper, by the way, was the delivery note of my proof-prints for the novel I wrote.