Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.

Brooks frames art as an inherently unsettling force: it “hurts” because it disrupts comfort, exposes difficult truths, and demands emotional or moral reckoning. By saying art “urges voyages,” she casts genuine artistic engagement as a kind of departure—into unfamiliar experience, empathy, risk, or self-revision. The final clause (“and it is easier to stay at home”) underscores the human preference for safety and habit, implying that both making art and truly receiving it require courage. The line also hints at art’s ethical dimension: it presses us to move beyond complacency, even when inertia and conformity offer an easier refuge.