It comes to no surprise then that we often use our brief moments of respite to mentally teleport to a fantastical world, where all is forgiven and life is a lot more simple and serene. For those more burdened than others by the drudgery of daily life, this escapist itch is predictably stronger. Even so, there certainly lies in all of us to some degree, a tiny Mephistophelian voice that, rather than tempt with material pleasures, goads us to gleefully abandon the present.
To put it another way: How many of you have ever had the desire, however fleeting, to drop everything and take a two-week sojourn to St. As escaping to the Caribbean is rarely a viable course of action — at least for those of us who wish to maintain our obligations, livelihoods, and grade point averages — we naturally drift to less ambitious ways to abscond from the diktats of reality.
For instance, we watch movies and television sitcoms, melding ourselves into the characters onscreen who seemingly never have to pay rent or file a W Of course, we do not only find escape in following the lives of fictional others. After all, the conversations we have every day, from Sunday brunch gossip to water cooler talk and barista banter, represent some of the most potent social glues holding communities together in America.
One can point to the dreamy procession of boats that Claude Monet drew at Argenteuil, conveniently leaving out the smokestacks of factories that surrounded the town in order to capture what could be real than what really was.
In fact, the entire landscape painting tradition in Tang-era China became an outlet for artists to find meaning in the natural world as political instability around them made reality devoid of it.
