Conveying truth is a struggle for artists, as it should be. It should also be the goal for artists of whatever medium, and there are some who have achieved it. For example, Mozart does so in Don Giovanni, especially in the moment when the commendatore’s statue appears at Don Giovanni’s door in the last act to punish the don for all his sins. The music that accompanies this appearance is the most frightening I’ve ever heard. It makes my heart stop, and by the time those few chords end, I worry that I will be lost. That the music for this character’s appearance is the same as that which begins the opera’s overture gives the latter, in retrospect, the force of dark fate and fate’s hellish results. . . from the very beginning.

Another such moment comes in the last paragraph of the story “The Dead” by James Joyce, my favorite paragraph in all of fiction. A kind young man who loves his extensive family, Gabriel Conroy is truly smitten with his wife Gretta as well, but is distanced from her by something he cannot determine. Only on Christmas night, after a party, does Gretta tell Gabriel about the boy she loved – and who loved her – when she was a girl. She knows that this boy, Michael Furey, died for love of her after having stood in the rain one night to speak with her. She has regretted not returning that affection ever since, because Michael Furey, she knows, held the very nature of love in his heart, and she was the object of it. She falls asleep weeping, and Gabriel looks out the hotel window at the snow.

It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

This writing is imbued with the depth of Gretta’s love, the fatal loss of it, and her husband’s deep and kind understanding of that loss.

Legend has it that the king of Spain was to visit Diego de Velázquez’s studio one day, and that Juan de Pareja secured a place there where the king would inevitably come across one of Juan’s own paintings. The king and his procession arrived, all dominion, pomp, and authority. When he approached Juan’s piece, the artist prostrated himself before His Majesty and explained that he was a slave, yet a member of Velázquez’s studio, and had taught himself to paint. He asked for help, for recognition as an artist. The king replied that "any man who has this skill cannot be a slave," at which point Velázquez had little option but to grant Juan his freedom.