Quote:
Originally Posted by kennyc
He's a f**king genius! It makes me want to just give up trying to write and I am generally the last person to say/feel that.
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There are so many writers that I consider superior and awe-inspiring (Shakespeare, Swift, Joyce, Borges, Kafka, Melville, Proust, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Hemingway, Becket, Pinter, Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Garcia Lorca, I can go on) and I feel a strange sense of relief and pleasure knowing that know matter how good I can get as a writer I will never come within a shadow of their beautiful work.
There is something reassuring in that for me, knowing that Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel exists, that the pyramids at Giza exist, that Guernica exists, knowing that a human being was able to write Hamlet and King Lear or had the guts to write Ulysses or the audacity to write The Trial and then ask that it be burned.
Knowing that there are great works of art out there allows me to experiment and try new things with my own work, to both free myself as a writer and yet gives me the courage to allow myself to fail, all the time knowing that there is something better and far beyond my reach which, perversely, also gives me hope for a kind of perfection that I know exists in the world.
I'm not a man of faith myself, but I imagine that those who do believe in God, are able to do so in part because it's almost a relief to know that there is something bigger and better than themselves, and that no matter how great they get, they are humbled by their deity and can find satisfaction and happiness with their lot in life rather than worry about the overwhelming possibilities that fate may allow for them.
I think as a writer a little humility is good for the soul. But it's good to have something to shoot for in terms of what you think of as perfection. If the stars were never so distant and so bright, we would never have built space ships to get closer to them.