Translation: Art Is Life but on a Different Rhythm

Excerpt translated from French from "L'Elégance du Hérisson" by Muriel Barbery, Gallimard edition, p. 188-189.

As we walk, through the continuity of our movement without spurts, and because our culture demands it, we try to restore what we believe is the essence of life: unimpeded efficiency and fluid performance that through the absence of rupture portrays the vital élan with which we accomplish everything. Here, the cheetah in action is the norm; all its gestures are harmonious; we cannot distinguish the first one from the one that follows, and the racing great beast seems like a single and long movement that symbolizes the deep perfection of life. But as Japanese women break up the powerful deployment of natural movement with their intermittent steps, at a time when we should feel the torment that overcomes the soul at the sight of nature affronted, on the contrary, we experience a strange bliss, as if rupture had given rise to ecstasy and the grain of sand to beauty. We perceive a paradigm of Art in this offense to the sacred rhythm of life, in this impeded walk, in the excellence born of constraint.  

And so, propelled beyond a nature that demands for it to be continuous and becoming both renegade and remarkable through its discontinuity, movement attains the level of aesthetic creation. 

For Art is life but on a different rhythm.