"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life"

William Faulkner’s observation about the artist’s purpose probes the relationship between art, time, and human experience. He suggests that art is an act of capturing the dynamic essence of life, movement, change, vitality, by “arresting” it, pausing the endless flux of reality. Art becomes a vessel that freezes motion, condensing the chaos and immediacy of existence into a deliberate arrangement: a painting’s composition, a poem’s lines, a novel’s scenes.

However, Faulkner does not see this arrest as a sterile immobilization. Rather, he calls the means “artificial”, a creation distinct from organic life, yet imbued with its energy. The paradox is that art’s stillness is not inert. Decades or even centuries later, when someone engages with the work, a stranger unconnected by time or circumstance, the frozen motion is reanimated. The sense of life, originally fixed, leaps back into action. The observer feels the pulse of the living moment, as though the barrier of years dissolves, and the artwork becomes animate once more.

Faulkner’s insight reaches toward art’s enduring power: its ability to bridge temporal distance, dissolving the boundaries between creator and spectator, past and present. A painted portrait, a novel’s tragic hero, or a song’s yearning melody, each holds a fragment of lived reality, preserved and recognizable to those who come long after. Art, then, is not merely a record but a resurrection. As the viewer brings their own consciousness to it, the fixed image stirs; meaning, emotion, and vitality renew themselves in an ongoing cycle.

Faulkner’s words celebrate the artist’s ambition to transcend mortality. Through art, life’s fleeting beauty and complexity survive, ever poised to move those who are willing to look closely and let the “arrested motion” ignite their experience of being alive.