“Can people who build so many fences around certain experiences—no smoking, no drinking, no immorality, and so on—can such people ever be real artists? Mustn’t the artist almost by definition live either totally without fences or with only make-shift, empirical fences-of-the-moment?”

Answer/Sister Carol Lynn Pearson

Certainly there cannot help but be a definite correlation between the depth of a person’s own experiences and his capacity to create. Therefore, you ask, mustn’t the artist (actor, writer, painter) open his soul to every possible experience that will increase his firsthand awareness of all that human life encompasses?

I happen to believe quite truly that there is a Divine Being who is our spiritual Father by virtue of his operating through divine laws that we too must operate through if we are to fulfill the measure of our creation. For this reason I am concerned with myself first as a person and second as a potential artist. I accept Jesus Christ as being divine. But putting that aside, I consider the patterns of behavior that he taught to be the most perfect that could ever be devised for the successful living of human life. The acceptance of this gives me little choice in the kinds of things I must at least try to do with my life. If I should behave in ways that are contrary to these beliefs for the sake of enlarging my reservoir of experience, there would be a basic violation of my integrity.

However, I do not believe that in following these patterns of behavior I am losing more than I am gaining in the absorbing of significant human experiences. There is something not entirely true in the image of building fences around the experiences disapproved. One cannot partake of every possible human experience. Sometimes the experiencing of one automatically builds a fence around the experiencing of another. Holding a belief in God is a significant human experience. So is holding a disbelief in God. Many people bounce around on the edges of both, and some sincerely embrace both at different times; but no one, just at will, can experience both of these possibilities—the one builds a fence around the other.

I hope no one tries to tell me that I’m missing a significant human experience by building a fence around smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol. The only thing of any significance this does is (when I’m away from home) to separate me in this particular thing from the group norm. And what’s wrong with that? Sometimes that separation itself turns into quite an interesting experience.

The fact of the matter is that the way I construct my fences permits certain types of experiences that most people fence out entirely by not even considering. But these very experiences constitute the greater part of my own joyful probings into life. The act of prayer, I believe, is one of the most significant of human experiences. Other more material acts also qualify. The payment of tithing is an experience in giving, in trust, and in obedience that has quite an impact on the character. The act of fasting has effects that are significant. People build fences around these experiences just as I build fences around the things that I do not do. Everyone builds fences. And everyone must choose experiences. The critical point is whether the choosing is done unthinkingly, or from social pressure, or from cowardice, or from a desire to be really significant yourself.

While I was in Russia several years ago, I had an interview with the head professor of the Moscow Art Theatre School, Alexander Mehilovich Karev. In our conversation he said to me, “I once asked Stanislavsky, ‘The man who kills, can he play a better Othello than the man who does not?’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘if he’s more talented.’”

• Author and Playwright