Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone's life.'... I did not understand what he meant. I did not feel I had to justify anything... I did not want to paint in order to justify anything, I wanted to paint because I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint the same way my father wanted to travel and work for the Rebbe. My father worked for Torah. I worked for - what? How could I explain it? For beauty? No. Many of the pictures I painted were not beautiful. For what, then? For a truth I did not know how to put into words. For truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.
The passage expresses a profound conflict between the necessity of creating art and the expectation to justify one's purpose through it. The narrator grapples with the idea that becoming a great artist is seen as a means to validate his existence and contributions to society, a notion he struggles to accept. He feels no obligation to conform his creativity to external purposes; rather, his desire to paint stems from an intrinsic...