Thursday, July 27, 2006
We are the blessed and the damned.
"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him...a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." -Pearl S. Buck
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There is a passage in Ian McEwan's "Amsterdam" where a fussy, overwrought composer bemoans the pathetic, unspeakably loutish manners of many artists, who then use their aesthetic stature and temperament to excuse their execrable behavior. He's willing to endure this from some of conspicuously sensitive nature and obvious talent, but in others it is so clearly just a ruse. In general, he says, novelists are the worst, excepts perhaps for poets, then he then sums it up his range of forbearance simply with: "Beethoven? Of course. Dylan Thomas? Absolutely not."
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