I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that

Host: The rain had stopped, but the air still carried its memory—that faint, cool, and earthy scent that lingers after a storm. Through the large, half-open window, the city lights flickered like tired stars, reflecting off the wet pavement. Inside the dimly lit café, a faint jazz melody drifted through the air, slow and melancholic. Steam rose from two cups of coffee between them, swirling like thoughts too heavy to speak.

Jack sat, his coat damp, his eyes fixed on the rain-spattered glass. Jeeny watched him, her hands folded, her fingers tapping lightly, as if measuring the silence.

Host: The quote had hung between them for a while now—Mary Oliver’s words, soft but dangerous, like a seed that refuses to die: “I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.”

Jack: “Save us,” he murmured, his voice low, rough. “You really think art can do that? Save us—from what, Jeeny? Ourselves?”

Jeeny: “From emptiness, Jack. From the grayness that creeps in when we forget how to feel. Art doesn’t feed the body, but it feeds the soul. Isn’t that a kind of salvation?”

Host: Jack smiled, a thin, almost cruel curve of lips. He leaned back, lighting a cigarette, the flame briefly illuminating his sharp features—a flash of steel in the shadow.

Jack: “That’s the problem, Jeeny. You talk about souls as if they exist outside biology. We’re animals with consciousness, not saints with brushes. Art is a luxury—it exists when bellies are full and wars are distant.”

Jeeny: “And yet, during wars, art has never died. In the trenches, soldiers scribbled poems. In the gulags, prisoners sang. In Auschwitz, there were drawings, music, plays performed in secret. Art survived when everything else was burned.”

Host: Her voice rose, soft but unbreakable, like light through a cracked door. Jack’s eyes flickered, but he said nothing at first. The smoke drifted upward, curling, vanishing.

Jack: “You’re romanticizing it. Those people didn’t create to save the world—they created to forget it. Art is escapism, a beautiful lie we tell ourselves to mask the ugly truth.”

Jeeny: “Then what do you call the truth, Jack? The truth that humans can build machines, colonize planets, and yet still weep at a song? Isn’t that feeling—that fragility—a kind of truth too?”

Host: The lights from a passing car swept across their faces—for an instant, both lit, both haunted. The café fell into hushed stillness, the clink of cups in the distance, the rain now a memory.

Jack: “You think a painting can change a war, Jeeny? That a poem can feed a child? Art is a reflection, not a remedy. It records our madness, but it doesn’t cure it.”

Jeeny: “And yet records are everything. If art didn’t exist, history would be numbers, dates, and dust. Art remembers what the facts can’t—the heartbeat, the sorrow, the hope. Without it, we’re machines counting corpses.”

Host: A pause—a long, aching one. Jack exhaled smoke and watched it dissolve like arguments in the air. Jeeny’s eyes glimmered, wet but steady.

Jack: “You’re talking about meaning, Jeeny, but meaning itself is a human invention. The universe doesn’t care about paintings or sonnets. Stars collapse, oceans rise, and we—we paint, sing, write, just to pretend it matters.”

Jeeny: “Maybe it doesn’t matter to the universe, but it matters to us. Isn’t that enough? You always measure value by utility. But the heart doesn’t work that way. When Van Gogh painted his stars, he was dying inside. Yet those swirls of light—they taught us h