The great beauty of art is its absence of certainty

By Scott Davie, Deputy Head of School, Senior Lecturer in Piano and Musicology, School of Music, Australian National University

It can be surprising when things are not what they seem. Take books, for example.

I recently finished The Outsider (aka The Stranger) by Albert Camus. I’m told many people read it at a younger age, and to prove the point I was given it by a nephew who’d discovered it as a teenager.

It’s not a particularly long book, yet as I turned the pages it seemed to change, revealing something unexpected. To begin with, I thought it slightly dull: a first-person account of a young Frenchman in Algiers, learning his mother had died.

There follows some rather ordinary reports…

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