Yumi and the Nightmare Painter - Brandon Sanderson
Chapter 4 > Page 29 · Location 433
“But then again, there’s nothing intrinsically valuable about any kind of art. That’s not me complaining or making light. It’s one of the most wonderful aspects to art—the fact that people decide what is beautiful. We don’t get to decide what is food and what is not. (Yes, exceptions exist. Don’t be pedantic. When you pass those marbles, we’re all going to laugh.) But we absolutely get to decide what counts as art.”
I always adored Hoid’s ramblings about art and philosophy, scattered through the Stormlight Archive series, and now I get a WHOLE BOOK NARRATED IN HIS VOICE!
This quote goes deep into Value Theory, and specifically Aesthetics. It is essentially the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, for beauty is a concept deeply tied to humanity. If there were no more humans to observe the stars in the sky, would they then still be beautiful? Who would deem them to be so?
Chapter 5 > Page 37 · Location 519
“Like a man with diarrhea in a sandpaper factory, sometimes all available options are less than ideal.”
I just thought this was funny lol.
Chapter 6 > Page 48 · Location 661
“She knew she should feel pride at her accomplishment, and virtually any other person would have. But she just felt… tired. And guilty over her lack of proper emotions. And more tired, because guilt of that sort is an immense burden. Heavier than the rocks she’d moved earlier. Then she felt ashamed. Because guilt has a great number of friends and keeps their addresses handy for quick summons.”
This endows Yumi with such a realistic sense of humanity that I can’t explain. Sanderson masterfully invokes highly specific, niche emotional experiences that give his characters a depth that I rarely find in other High Fantasy novels.
Chapter 9 > Page 73 · Location 928
“It’s a common mistake to assume that someone is weak because they are accommodating. If you think this, you might be the type who has no idea how much effort—how much strength—it takes to put up with your nonsense.”
Again with the witty remarks. Hoid loves to insult the reader.
Chapter 10 > Page 92 · Location 1182
“But you were once young and nervous too. We all were. There’s nothing wrong with being a tad awkward. It is a sign of a new experience—and new experiences are among the cosmere’s best forms of emotional leavening. We shouldn’t be so afraid of showing inexperience. Cynicism isn’t interesting; it is often no more than a mask we place over tedium.”
Insightful
Chapter 12 > Page 111 · Location 1422
“never stopped being surprised at how durable human beings can be. They can survive in almost any environment. They can recover from debilitating loss. They can be crushed physically, mentally, emotionally—and still ask you how your day is going. Perhaps nightmares are Cultivation’s method of giving us a way of surviving trauma in a strangely safe environment. (At least safe physically.) A way to put it behind us, forget the details, but retain the growth. Nightmares are vicarious living done in our own minds.”
A fascinating take on the evolutionary purpose of nightmares.
Chapter 23 > Page 255 · Location 3181
“Even cultivated crops were granted more independence than she. As soon as she thought that, she quashed it. Crushing her longing, her wanderlust, her dreams until they were flat as paper, more easily filed away deep within her soul. Despite it all, that’s still my instinct, she thought, listening to Painter eat. I know I’ve been lied to. Yet my training holds. It’s a depressing fact. Abuse is a more effective form of captivity than a cell will ever be.”
This is Yumi finally acknowledging that the world around her has been false, that the life she has been living out of a sense of duty was not required. At any point she could have stopped obeying the strict rules that she had been brought up with, and no one would have stopped her. Yumi finally grasps her agency and capacity for choice, and it is a bittersweet realisation that all of this time has been wasted.
The final sentence “Abuse is a more effective form of captivity than a cell will ever be”, evokes the metaphor of The Elephant and The Rope. Yumi’s entire childhood was spent in constant brainwashing that she has been chosen for a special duty, and that she must never have freedom to live her own life. In this way she is like a circus elephant, who having been tied down by a rope since birth and internalising that there is no escape, doesn’t realise she has long since outgrown these bonds and has the power to break them.
Chapter 27 > Page 321 · Location 4056
““Great. We’ll go there.” “You don’t know what a carnival is.” “Are you coming with me?” He hesitated, then nodded. “Then,” she said, “I don’t particularly care what it is.””
awwwwww
Chapter 28 > Page 334 · Location 4219
“It’s said that everything you eat, even the air you breathe, becomes part of you. The axi that make up the matter you take in come to make up you instead. I, however, find that the moments we take into our souls as memories are far more important than what we eat. We need those moments as surely as the air, and they linger. Potent. Yes, a person is more than their experiences, stacked up like stones. But our best moments are the foundations we use to reach for the sky.”
Insanely deep commentary on the importance of good memories.
Chapter 28 > Page 335 · Location 4235
“Regardless, here’s the thing: art doesn’t need to be good to be valuable. I’ve heard it said that art is the one truly useless creation—intended for no mechanical purpose. Valued only because of the perception of the people who view it. The thing is, everything is useless, intrinsically. Nothing has value unless we grant it that value. Any object can be worth whatever we decide it to be worth. And to these two, Yumi’s painting was priceless.”
Value Theory again, this is so cool. The same can be said for all art, including music, and I often think this about playing the piano. I have to remind myself that the music is given its value and use by me. If someone calls music “useless”, I can equally call anything else in the world useless. This is a value judgement and says more about the values of the person making the claim than it does about the object itself.
Chapter 28 > Page 336 · Location 4253
““Why did you do it?” “Because… I was too weak to tell the truth?” “Because,” she said pointedly, “you didn’t want to hurt the people you loved.” “I lied to you.” “Again,” she said, “because you wanted so desperately to be the thing I needed. You wanted to help me, Painter. And yes, maybe you wanted to pretend to be someone great. That’s not the action of a liar, but a dreamer.””
Chapter 34 > Page 396 · Location 4977
““You said the machine would replace you. It can’t.” “But—” “It can summon spirits,” he said. “But it can’t create art. Art is about intent, Yumi. A rainbow isn’t art, beautiful though it might be. Art is about creation. Human creation. A machine can lift way more than Tojin can—doesn’t make it less impressive when he lifts more than almost any human being.””
Very topical in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Yumi’s job was threatened by a machine, but she was an artist. When humans create things, we are changed by that process. We learn and develop through the art that we create, in a way that machines do not. So while the machine could stack rocks like Yumi did, it was not true art as there was no intent and meaning behind it.
Chapter 37 > Page 420 · Location 5249
“you do need to learn to separate the story—and what it has done to you—from the individual who prompted it. Art—and all stories are art, even the ones about real people—is about what it does to you. The true hero is the one in your mind, the representation of an ideal that makes you a better person. The individual who inspired it, well, they’re like the book on the table or the art on the wall. A vessel. A syringe full of transformational aspiration.”
Chapter 40 > Page 457 · Location 5688
“Stacking. You might not call it an art. You might find it the strangest idea. This is what Yumi’s people revere? This is what they consider the highest aesthetic achievement of their culture? This? Yet all art is meaningless without those to admire it. You don’t get to decide what constitutes art. But we together do.”
Yumi’s people might find our art forms to be meaningless and strange…
Chapter 41 > Page 459 · Location 5725
“This was art. Something the machine, however capable in the technical details, could never understand. Because art is, and always has been, about what it does to us. To the one shaping it and the one experiencing it. For Yumi, on that transcendent day, she was both. Artist and audience. Alone. Until the spirits joined her.”
Yumi triumphs over the machine, she has trained for this moment for thousands of years and her intentions are beyond what it can simulate. The spirits gravitated toward Yumi because no matter the scale of the work done by the machine, it cannot match the meaning and emotion behind Yumi’s work. Yumi is a real person fighting to protect the people she cares most about, and that Intent is much deeper and more beautiful than the soulless labour of a non-living thing.
This is particularly relevant with recent developments in AI. We must ask ourselves what constitutes real art, and whether we will prioritise creations that have real meaning and intention behind them, shaping the life of the artist and the audience, or whether we will give in to what is the fastest and cheapest and most convenient in the moment, thereby erasing our own humanity and undervaluing the thousands of years of history that has shaped art.
Page 468 · Location 5814
“The last wisps of darkness vanished. And at the end of it all, when someone finally thought to check on him, they found Painter huddled against the wall beneath a masterpiece of incredible caliber, holding a young woman tight in his arms. As real as anyone else. Because she wanted to be.”
This is the culmination of Yumi’s development as a character over the course of the entire novel. In the beginning, despite having full capacity to do so, Yumi is afraid to act independently or defy the wishes of those around her. By the end, even upon realising that she is not even real and will soon stop exisiting, Yumi fights with all of her power and Intent to live the life that she wants to live. Her will is so strong that she is able to defy this world-shattering limitation and join Nikaro for her dream life in the real world. We continue the metaphor with the elephant breaking the rope and realising that it can bring the whole circus to the ground.
Page 474 · Location 5878
“Plus, here’s the thing. A kiss doesn’t need to be good to be valuable. It doesn’t serve any real purpose. It’s valued solely because of the person you share it with. Things only have the value we give to them. And likewise, actions can be worth whatever we decide them to be worth. And so, to these two, that kiss was priceless.”