I might have learned the meaning of life today

Or that there is not one.

Or neither.

I drove to Augusta, Georgia today with my boss, Jeffrey. We passed an abandoned school house he lived in once and he told me about how Herman Melville's grandson was the surgeon who once sewed part of his thumb back on. The drive was about two hours.

We were driving to the studio of an artist, Philip Morsberger, a painter in his early seventies who was loaning us nineteen of his paintings, each almost as tall as me. Most of his paintings were wildly colorful and cartoonish; "cozy chaos" as my workmate Jessie described them.

Jeffrey gently sifted through them, carrying them to different spots in the room like he was arranging a scene in a movie, looking at them closely, then from far away. His eyes fell on one unlike the others - it was an abstract piece. Fat, short brush strokes in almost every color created a diagonal cascade down the canvas which must have been six feet tall. There were no hats or faces or airplanes like most of his other works. Artists call it, aptly, an abstraction.

All my life I have been so clueless to abstract art...these creations with seemingly no meaning behind them, random strokes across a blank canvas. Meaningless color. And then, the arrogant artist's statement alongside it telling me this piece represents LOVE or WAR or MY MESSED UP CHILDHOOD. The fact that the creator could assign seemingly random attributes to these seemingly random brush strokes always came off as pretentious and nonsensical to me. Was that really why these strokes had fallen the way they did? Or was the creator simply trying to assign meaning to them out of some strange desire for order?

All my life I had wanted to know, "What do these brush strokes really mean? Why this yellow? Why this red here? Is this really supposed to represent war? A mess of colors? Am I supposed to believe that?"

And for the first time in my life, I stood before an abstract piece, this cascade of random brush strokes, with the artist right next to me. It seemed to good to be true.

"It's a really beautiful piece," I told him. And turning to this incredibly sweet, witty and talented old man, I asked: "What does it mean?"

He looked surprised for a moment, and I blushed, thinking I had definitely shown my extreme ignorance of art.

"It doesn't mean a thing," he said, looking at the work, not me. "It's just paint arranged in an arresting manner."

There it was. The meaning I had been searching for my whole life....was that there was no meaning. That random brush strokes are just random. Designed to be aesthetically pleasing, and nothing else. Not designed with any higher meaning but just to exist and be art....

...

On our way out he beckoned towards the two potted plants sitting by the front stairs of his studio.

"I forgot to introduce you," he said, beckoning towards them, "This is Bruce, and this is Kitty, my plants."

He seemed all in all to be one of the most happy individuals I have met of his age, and I will not forget having met him any time soon.