What art offers is space — a certain breathing room for the spirit.

Updike frames art less as instruction or moral improvement than as an enabling condition: it creates “space,” a pause in the press of necessity, habit, and social demand. The metaphor of “breathing room” suggests relief and renewal—art as a temporary widening of inner life where feeling, imagination, and reflection can expand without immediate practical consequence. In this view, art’s value lies in its capacity to suspend the ordinary tempo of experience and let the spirit recover its range. The line also implies a modest but profound claim: art may not solve problems, yet it can make existence more inhabitable by granting psychological and spiritual latitude.