open ourselves to

"The world that we are shown in the work of the modem painters and writers is opaque and dense. Their vision is not inspired primarily by intellectual premises; it is a spontaneous revelation of the kind of which perhaps only art is capable: it shows us where we stand, whether or not we choose to understand it. If we really open ourselves to the experience of two works of art as widely separated in time as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the distance that Western man has traveled in the intervening centuries is revealed to us more clearly than through any number of abstract arguments. And the road that has been traveled is irreversible." (Irrational Man by William Barrett)

Could you please explain what the author means by the blue clause?

Thank you.

Cadzao