leave it to the artists and universal dilemmas

By its very nature, life inflicts on us universal pains based on timelines - psychological and social realities; we all wrestle with the dilemmas of childhood, education, family, work, love, ageing and death - many of which bear semi-official labels (adolescent angst, midlife crisis, postpartum depression). New secular cycles of representative sorrows could anchor themselves around these stages and so articulate the true nature of their camouflaged dimensions. They could teach us lessons about the real course of life in the safety and quiet of a gallery, before events themselves found a way of doing the same with their characteristic violence and surprise.

We might consider setting contemporary artists the task of depicting the seven sorrows of parenthood, the twelve sorrows of adolescence or a twenty one sorrows of a divorce.

The strategy of organizing a cycle of representative images of difficulty, of enriching these with commentaries and hanging them in an ambulatory circuit around a contemplative space could be as effective in the lay as in the Christian realm.

Source: Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists, p. 224