THE arts – all the arts – are ways of approaching reality, “coming at it” as, variously, we do. And at the moment of seeing, the coherence is precise. It doesn’t have to be a cosmic, fatal realisation, like that of King Lear or Hercules in the Sophocles play we ended with last week. That moment of epiphany might happen in mundane or magical circumstances, not only to adults, but even, perhaps, to children.

Think of that beautiful transition in Maurice Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortileges when the selfish, impudent child has seen the spirits of his room come alive – the armchair, the grandfather clock, the teapot, cup, the shepherds and shepherdesses from the wallpaper – they all come to life and reproach him for his carelessness and malicious cruelty and ungratefulness.

At the end of the first half of the fantasy, Colette’s libretto has the child groaning about his sore head as his room has become a cell of reproach and guilt. A feline duet reaches cacophonic proportions and then, suddenly, the walls part, the ceiling flies up and the child is standing in a glowing, moonlit garden. It’s one of the loveliest and most surprising moments in modern music, transforming the location from indoors to outside and offering a sense of new possibility.

The world of the garden will also reproach the child, but as he understands and repents, it will also support him and return him to his mother and home, a chastened, good, wise, kind “enfant”: transformed. The promise of transformation is contained in prospect in the child’s joyous cry when he enters the garden: “Ah, what happiness to find you again, Garden!” – “Ah, Quelle joie de te retrouver, Jardin!”

The child’s discovery of the garden, like his sensitivity to the spirits of the things he has hurt, points forward to his understanding, remorse, and forgiveness. His fear is part of this – he fears the threat of the things he has wounded but, increasingly, also, he comprehends his own capacity to cause suffering.

This understanding comes through a dialogue in which spirits speak, and to allow that to happen, a silence has to be created.

I mentioned Socratic dialogue in the very first essay in this series, the idea that we might offer various propositions which we could argue about. The context for that argument has been, I hope, a listening silence. And that silence was our subject when we were talking about Rembrandt, Picasso and MacLean, in last week’s essay. But it is part of something greater.

Through this dialogue and this silence, good things happen. This also is the good of the arts. This is how we learn to recognise important things: the truly authoritative chords to which we know we must assent, or the tireless freshness of invention, the humour and pleasure of perception and illumination, along with the willingness to enter life’s difficult corners – these are qualities we have been exploring in these essays.

Examples might be multiplied, of course. When Robert Louis Stevenson died in Samoa in 1894, the islanders, who had given him the name Tusitala, the storyteller, agreed to a law that on the mountain where he is buried, from that time on, no birds were to be hunted. When you climb to the summit of Mount Vaea, no gunshots break the proximate silence, but the air is full of birdsong. The gift of that silence and song and the spirit of Samoa’s “writer in eternal residence” – these things continue.

And in such silence, the arts persist in their human application, across the ephemera of history. The Irish writer Nuala O’Faolain once attended a performance of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, in the company of the great communist teacher Arnold Kettle. When the curtain came down O’Faolain was crying. “Why is ensemble singing so beautiful?” she asked. And Kettle replied: “People would be like that all the time, if they could.”

Whether you believe in the socialism behind that sentiment or not, the vision it implies is one of hope, society perfected, free of deformations and oppressions. People so freed would communicate perfectly, as they do when they sing together in opera. Music prefigures whatever there can be of human and social perfection. There is an ideal, perfect, shape behind the appearance of things. There is the possibility of perfect communication, and to try to establish social justice is a way of moving towards it.

This hopeful movement towards the desire for the possibility of perfect communication is the point of all the arts; that is why they are so subversive. So much of what we take for granted tends to direct us quietly away from this.

There’s a lovely little book called Them And Us In Literature in which Paul O’Flynn remembers his kids bringing home a couple of books from the library. He settled down to read to them. The first one was about a sad donkey – sad because he had long funny ears. They kept catching on barbed wire, tripping him up, getting in his breakfast and generally making the rest of the donkeys bray with laughter.

The donkey tried everything: tying them in a knot, turning them inside out, visiting a quack vet, but it was no use. Tears rolled down his face. Then one day along came a lady donkey who just adored long ears. She fell in love with the sad donkey, cheered him up, and soon they were married and lived happily ever after.

THE second story was about a goldfish. He was browned off too – bored out of his mind in a garden pond swimming around the same cement gnome every day. So one night he popped into the overflow pipe, down the drain and out to sea in search of adventure. His mum and dad were against it and preferred to stay at home watching Coronation Street.

The sea turned out a disaster: cold, dark, salty and full of miserable crabs. Tears rolled down the goldfish’s face. Then one day he found himself swimming past the end of a familiar drain. Up he went, along the overflow pipe and pop! Back into the old familiar little pond. Mum and dad were overjoyed, the goldfish never grumbled about boredom again and lived happily ever after.

Two different stories and, as Paul O’Flynn says, harmless plastic in themselves, but when you stop and listen, how often the same pattern and the same message get repeated: “Your world and your position in it might seem dismal but they’re as good as you’ll get so there’s no point in doing anything about it. If you try and improve it then either, like the donkey, you’re wasting your time or, like the goldfish, you’ll only make matters worse.

Best advice: Leave things as they are, be grateful for what you’ve got, do as you’re told, and in the end you’ll learn to love it all.” (PS, Support your local moderate candidates.)

Don’t think too deeply about anything.

It’s comforting not to have to worry about such things. But maybe it’s more comforting to find a way of asking the difficult questions. There may be answers unsuspected yet. If the snow falls and the contours change, we’ll always need new maps, even when the old maps persist, defiant in the memory.

And in the final essay in this series next week, we’ll see what answers we can come up with.