Life continually requires that we write down a few
words of thanks: for holidays, meals, presents or
people’s place in our hearts. However, too often,
our messages end up flat or somewhat unconvincing;
we say that the dinner was ‘wonderful’,
the present ‘brilliant’ and the holiday
‘the best ever’, all of which may be true while
failing to get at what truly touched or moved us.
To render our messages more effective, we
might take a lesson from an unexpected quarter:
the history of art. Many paintings and poems
are in effect a series of thank you notes to
parts of the world. They are thank yous for the
sunset in springtime, a river valley at dawn,
the last days of autumn or the face of a loved
one. What distinguishes great from mediocre art
is in large measure the level of detail with which
the world has been studied. A talented artist is,
first and foremost, someone who takes us into
the specifics of the reasons why an experience
or place felt valuable. They don’t merely tell
us that spring is ‘nice’, they zero in on the
particular contributing factors to this niceness:
leaves that have the softness of a newborn’s
hands, the contrast between a warm sun and a sharp
breeze, the plaintive cry of baby blackbirds.
The more the poet moves from generalities
to specifics, the more the scene comes alive
in our minds. The same holds true in painting. A
great painter goes beneath a general impression
of pleasure in order to select and emphasise
the truly attractive features of the landscape:
they show the sunlight filtering through the
leaves of the trees and reflecting off of a pool
of water in the road; they draw attention
to the craggy upper slopes of a mountain
or the way a sequence of ridges and valleys open
up in the distance. They’ve asked themselves with
unusual rigour what is it that they particularly
appreciated about a scene and faithfully
transcribed their salient impressions. Some of
the reason why great artists are rare is that
our minds are not well set up to understand why we
feel as we do. We register our emotions in broad
strokes and derive an overall sense of our moods
long before we grasp the basis upon which they
rest. We are bad at travelling upstream from our
impressions to their source, it feels frustrating
to have to ask too directly what was really
pleasing about a present or why exactly a person
seemed charming to have dinner with. But we can
be confident that if our minds have been affected,
the reasons why they have been so will be lodged
somewhere in consciousness as well, waiting to be
uncovered with deftness and patience. We stand to
realise that it wasn’t so much that the food was
‘delicious’ but that the potatoes in particular
had an intriguing rosemary and garlic flavour
to them. A friend wasn’t just ‘nice’; they
brought a hugely sensitive and generous tone
to bear in asking us what it had been like for us
in adolescence after our dad died. And the camera
wasn’t just a ‘great present’; it has an immensely
satisfying rubbery grip and a reassuringly
clunky shutter sound that evokes a sturdier,
better older world. The details will be there,
waiting for us to catch them through our mental
sieve. Praise works best the more specific it can
be. We know this in love; the more a partner
can say what it is they appreciate about us,
the more real their affection can feel. It is
when they’ve studied the shape of our fingers,
when they’ve recognised and appreciated the quirks
of our character, when they’ve clocked the words
we like or the way we end a phone call that the
praise starts to count. The person who has given a
dinner party or sent us a present is no different.
They too hunger for praise in its specific rather
than general forms. We don’t have to be great
artists to send effective thank you notes: we
just need to locate and hold on tightly to two or
three highly detailed reasons for our gratitude.
