Book excerpt: Although the creative impulse surges in revolt against everyday reality, breaking through its confines, it makes pacts with that reality’s essential laws and returns to it to modulate its sense. In fact, it is through praxis that imagination and artistic inventiveness transmute the vital concerns of life, giving them human measure. But at the same time art’s inspiration imbues life with aesthetic sense, which lifts human experience to the spiritual. Within these two perspectives art launches messages of specifically human inner propulsions, strivings, ideals, nostalgia, yearnings prosaic and poetic, profane and sacral, practical and ideal, while standing at the fragile borderline of everydayness and imaginative adventure. Art’s creative perduring constructs are intentional marks of the aesthetic significance attributed to the flux of human life and reflect the human quest for repose. They mediate communication and participation in spirit and sustain the relative continuity of culture and history.