ECONOMY
1 The economy of genius
A genius is one for whom more things mean more than they do to the rest of us, and all in a new way.
Teeming brains have trained themselves to have punctual inspirations, and have cultivated a knack for scoring habitual lucky hits.
There is no kind of food that venturesome minds can’t make use of to grow to be what they are. They are omnivorous yet monomaniac. They may take in a broad spread of stuff, yet they use it all to feed their solitary fixation. There’s nothing that they can’t do without, but they let nothing go to waste. They can profit from everything, while not requiring one lone thing. They need no stimulus outside their own minds, yet they can use whatever comes to hand. All is dispensable, but nothing is lost. Each thing serves, but none is needed.
When the mind’s on fire, all facts fuel it. ‘To a poet,’ as Johnson says, ‘nothing can be useless.’ Their insights make all things redundant and all more fruitful.
Everything is food for thought. But it goes straight through most people, and does them no good.
A fecund mind can draw nourishment even from its own sterility.
2 Genius is an affinity for a particular medium
Genius is not a gift for general creativeness but a preternatural affinity for a single medium. It is a mind spurred to a high pitch of activity by the possibilities of the form in which it works.
Genius is at its core material. It gives free play to all the resources of its chosen art. It is morally wayward, but fixed in its sensible form. Shakespeare makes a world of pure words, Mozart of notes, and Velasquez of paint. And if words, notes or paint had not been available to them, they would have ceased to create. As the soul lives in this flesh and would die outside it, so a prolific mind can think only by immersion in its medium.
Why do writers claim that they write in spite of words? Do composers complain that they could write great music, if it weren’t for all those pesky notes?
There is more imagination in Le Corbusier’s austere modifications of the built form than in all Gaudi’s grotesqueries. And there is more vision in one of Cézanne’s unobtrusive still lives than in the nightmares of Fuseli or Piranesi. Art must be perennially revolutionizing its means of representation.
3 Spendthrift of genius
A prolific artist or hero or a whole age knows when to conserve their force and when to spend it. They sagaciously save all their strength for the high quests which they know will break them. They draw on a mental thrift that lives beyond its means. Their squandering is the true prudence.
4 The great effects of small differences
What small differences make all the difference to us. The magnification of slim distinctions is the source of all great things. Evolution is the long process which starts with small causes and ends in great effects. And culture is a means of speeding up and magnifying the effects of small causes. A forceful mind starts with a few lean advantages and stretches them to large effects. Napoleon, a marginally more skilful general than his peers, overran the whole of Europe. Transpose one or two notes of a rude tune, and it makes the most delectable air. ‘Trifles make perfection,’ as Michelangelo said.
Shift your angle of vision by a few degrees, and the whole world takes on a radically different aspect.
Though daring minds may say the same thing as dull ones, they mean incalculably more by it. Their bald yes or no may give the clue to a whole table of values.
What drab constituents may add up to a masterwork, yet how magically it will upraise them to epiphanies. A thousand shuffling steps lead to the peak of achievement. A slight mutation may through many forks in time throw up a fresh type.
ORIGINALITY
5 Genius and originality
The task of the thinker is to conceive thoughts that are true, important and original. It’s not hard to say new things about what is trivial, or important things that are trite. Scholars do the first, and moralists the second.
Concepts are like musical instruments, which many of us have learnt to play, but few know how to compose with.
Even for the most adventurous inquirer originality doesn’t beam like continual sunshine, but may flash like a stray thunderbolt.
One of the few pains that life spares us is that of conceiving new thoughts.
Your freshest discoveries will in the end fence in your thinking.
6 The solitude of genius
Bold searchers are enveloped in a soundless solitude, which our babble is too blunt to pierce. At the outset they seem to us not mistaken or mad, but small and peripheral like far-flung stars. And we pay them no mind, since they twinkle so far from the constellation of our own inert views. ‘The higher we soar,’ Nietzsche says, ‘the smaller we look to those that cannot fly.’ Most of us can’t make out a new truth till someone points to where it is and why it matters.
Pioneering minds are as many years in advance of their time as it takes the world to shrink their fiery insights to its own soggy truisms. They seem as far in front of it as distant suns whose light takes so long to reach us.
A great idea opens up at its back a silent canyon, into which you can hear all the old certitudes lurch and crash.
7 New truths repel us
Originality and abstraction make too thin and chilly an air for our gross minds to breathe. So we rush to get back down to the lowlands of our muggy cant and anecdotes.
A narrow mind grabs hold of the largest questions by the smallest handle.
A new truth repels people like a dishevelled and disreputable freak. They shun it till it’s been scrubbed and spruced up as a prim commonplace. It ceases to alarm them, once the crowd has claimed it for its own. And they come to dote on it on grounds as risible as those for which they initially spurned it. They embrace it once it’s been translated into the debilitated discourse of their empty platitudes.
Most people can’t grasp a new truth till they have assimilated it to their old lies.
Few people will take the trouble to get to know a new idea till they’re sure that it is so well known that there will be some cachet in getting to know it or some shame in not knowing it.
Even the most fearless minds distrust their freshest insights, since they can discern in them neither their own self nor the stock tropes of their drove. Theorists may lack the courage to tease out all the implications of their own theory.
8 Genius renovates prejudices
Philosophers have forged the most inventive and quirky theories, which have served only to bolster the archaic totems of their tribe, and to universalize its customs as general laws. In christendom most of them, like Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley or Hegel, wove their diverse fabrics of speculative thought which by some divine congruence all proved that the christian faith is the true one. And nowadays, though it’s clear that equality is a baseless sham, they all found their rigorous reflections on this lazy and acceptable prejudice as if it were a plain fact.
‘A great many people,’ says William James, ‘think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.’ But few people go to the trouble of rearranging them. They just apply them to new facts in the confidence that they will be proved right once more. They are sure that they have said something witty when they trim an old catchphrase to fit a new context.
If we have an open mind on a question, it’s because we haven’t spent the time and thought on it to make it fit our stock notions.
The most daring builders end by renovating the dilapidated tropes of their time and place. And if they do more, that is still all that we want from them.
How convenient, that our first principles fall in pat with the prejudices of our age.
We learn by using new clichés in place of old.
9 Waylaid into originality
Thinkers have to toil so untiringly to reach a fresh idea, that you can’t blame them if they fail to account for all the obvious reasons that might invalidate it. Next to thinking a new thought, the hardest thing is to critically review your old ones. The average professor could disprove Descartes’s cogito in ten minutes.
If thinkers were resolved to believe or say nothing but what is true, they would have found no truths to speak at all. ‘Can it be,’ asked Keats, ‘that the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections?’ Nothing is more fatal to the truth than to assume that you know what you do not. And yet if you didn’t assume that you know more than you do, you would be able to find no truths at all.
The great sin in thinking is to assume that you know what you don’t know. And yet if you never did that, you could make no discoveries at all.
Thinkers thirst for the new, and gulp down gallons of the false to slake their craving for it.
10 Novelty
Human beings are skittish creatures who love what looks new as much as they fear and fight change. Yet they pine for repetition as much as they pant for what is cheap and just coined. They are bedazzled by innovation in trifles, but they squint when it is shown in anything more sizable. What they crave is ceaselessly recurring novelty and ceaselessly varied replication. Both the new-fangled and the old-fashioned take hold of their hearts. They want all things surprising, and all things recognizable. Hypnotized by their low familiar dreams, they won’t lift their eyes to high imagination. They now, as Colton wrote, ‘run after that which is new, but are prejudiced in favour of that which is old.’
People love to do new things as much as they hate to think new thoughts.
An age of hectic innovating such as ours won’t wait for real originality, which takes so long to ripen. Change is the enemy of the new. We change so fast, that we don’t have time to make what is fresh.
REPETITION
11 Obsessive genius
The one sound method is mad obsession.
The best way to master a new idea is by stationing it with your obsessions.
A concept, like a territory, is the property not of the first person to explore it, or of the best to occupy it, but of the one who has seized the most thorough hold of it. And here bulk may do more than brilliance, as Proust or Dickens shows.
Aren’t most of our fixations as facile as they are consuming, and as empty as they are tenacious? They are the obverse of our insouciance. Girls and boys flit from one toy or sport to the next, since their green vagrant moods have not yet formed the hard skeleton of a career which will hold up their full-grown interests.
Dour obsession may yield the fruit of sweet reason.
The thoughts that fill our minds from one moment to the next make up the best and worst of us. We can grow just as large or small as they are. And since the one thing that fills the minds of most people is their schemes to get more money or fun, what can be hoped from them?
The same obsessiveness may make either a large mind or a captious pedant.
We are too distracted to reason consecutively or systematically. So we have to ruminate compulsively. How could you compose and edit the successive drafts of your thoughts, but by revisiting them in relays of obsession? Those who have thought much know that they have never thought deeply or for long.
12 Originality is a repeating
Originality is where you end. It is not where you set off from. You don’t come from the cradle with a clean slate. You are prone to take on all the coatings of suffocating custom. And you learn to create by endless reiteration, each time exchanging a thin sliver of new for old, till at last you echo your way to individuality.
Creators start off by mimicking a form’s outer mannerisms, till they reach the core and they pass out of imitation’s junior school. Those who centre their minds on a small square of thought retrace the same ground so often that they may at last come to a new view of it. Ideas evolve not by abrupt convulsions but by slow geological accretion. In thought as in evolution there are no saltations.
Thinking works like natural selection. It requires a great deal of repetition, and a few random mutations.
It may take you years to see some things. But having seen them once, you start to see them all the time. ‘If you are possessed by an idea,’ Mann says, ‘you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.’ Those who think new thoughts keep restating them. They’re rediscovering them over and over for the first time, startled that what is so unlikely could be so true.
13 Originality is a late growth
You need a long ancestry of thinkers to draw on if you are to strike out on a fresh path. Originality is a late growth. It comes at the end of a tradition, not at its birth.
A good artist experiments and innovates. A great one reaps and culminates. ‘Sowing is not as difficult as reaping,’ as Goethe points out.
Dull writers, such as roman ones, have descendants. The best, like Shakespeare, have nothing but forebears. They bring to completion what has gone before them, but don’t foreshadow what will come after. They are not planters or sowers but perfecters and reapers.
Most notions have long been platitudes by the time that they are first put in words.
It takes years to see a thing for the first time. And to think new thoughts is the last thing that our minds learn to do.
It is only when a culture nears its end that it builds up the monuments which will justify the violent course of its growth. Art and thought are evening stars.
14 Genius by imitation
An independent mind matures by imitating. And artists grow to be who they are by emulating what they are not. Genius, as Reynolds wrote, ‘is the child of imitation.’
I fall short of my mentors and models, either because I ape them so badly, or because I ape them too well.
If you could find the perfect model for your work, what would be the point of doing it?
It is our instinct for imitating that leads us beyond instinct and imitation.
Great artists are inimitable, not because they are so peculiar and personal, but because their stark impersonality gives us no idiosyncrasies to mimic.
Those who copy inadvertently jeer at those who copy intently. But one thing you learn when you set your mind to imitate is that most of the time you don’t do much else. When I think that I’m behaving spontaneously, I am usually just mimicking models that I’m not aware of, because the rest of the world is mimicking them too.
Choose to emulate what’s fresh, and you are freed from following fads.
You surrender to influences like a surfer to a wave, to see to what height it will lift you and how far it will take you.
People copy by nature, but grow original by art. They imitate by instinct. But the patterns that they imitate are allocated to them by custom.
AHEAD OF ITS TIME
15 The sick are first to catch the diseases of the future
The flights of great minds are further in advance of them than the great minds are of their time. And the great minds lag behind their own ideas almost as far as we lag behind them.
Minor writers divine the age to come with more clairvoyance than a major one, since they stay closer to the stale notions which are sporing it. Great insights are perennial rather than prescient.
Those who see farther into the future have caught its diseases a few years before the rest of us. If great minds are harbingers of what’s to come, it’s because they are farther down the road to degeneration. The poet, as Rimbaud wrote, is ‘the sickest of the sick, the great felon, the great accursed.’ The highest is the unhealthiest, and the most holy is the most accursed. Those who are not decadent are stupid. If each age were not the heir to a long process of decadence, it would have to relearn what the past had found out. As Pessoa wrote, ‘Decadent eras abound in mental vitality, mighty eras in intellectual weakness.’
A mind healthy and at ease would be sterile and have not a single thought. It would be so well adapted to its environment, that it would have no reason to change.
A demagogue says the wrong thing at the right time. A genius says the right thing at the always wrong time.
Science casts up problems which it takes a great mind to solve. In art the problem would not have been posed but that a great mind appeared on the scene to pose it.
16 The genius of reaction
Reactionaries like Burke or Maistre are best qualified to read the present. And revolutionaries like Marx are best qualified to read the past. Those who see farthest in front of their own era may lag centuries behind it. They’re resurrectionists, who suture the joints of their revelations from the exhumed assumptions of the past. Nietzsche’s thoughts were so untimely because most of them were already hoary three thousand years before he thought them.
17 The present is the past’s ungrateful child
The present detects in the best minds of the past plenty of plausible grounds to commend its own progress. It feels flattered by their advanced views, since they smoothed the way for its own truisms. And it feels flattered by their retrograde dogmas, since they give it an excuse to be smug.
To celebrate great minds for being ahead of their time is to yield to the falsehood that the future must be right.
We praise past masters for surmounting the pieties of their own age and presaging the pieties of ours. We pay them the fulsome compliment of acknowledging that they were preparing the way for us.
The present looks on the past as a precocious child. It would not think much of it had it not grown up to be itself.
The present is a ruthless darwinist. It always records that the right side won, since it was leading up to it. As monks saw their parochial creed prefigured in every personage or happenstance in books or history, so we read in a strong writer such as Shakespeare the first flickerings of our own egalitarian prejudices.
It’s those whose minds are in thrall to the idols of the age who take it that a genius must be ahead of its time.
MEDIOCRITY
18 Genius and mediocrity
A brilliant mind delights in its own productions. But so does a dull and lustreless one. What artist feels so exultant as the self-deluded poetasters of Catullus or Borges? Mediocrity is all that greatness is except great.
Genius has no heart, but neither does stupidity.
Goethe proves how ineluctably commonplace the mind of a superlative creator may be. And Johnson proves how strong an intentionally commonplace and conservative mind may be. Voltaire shows how deep a superficial mind can probe if it’s sharp enough. And Joyce shows what a dull mind a dazzling technician may have.
Montaigne was an undistinguished mind raised to genius by the accident of his vocation and method. It was only by writing his book that he made himself the sort of man who could write it. ‘I have not made my book any more than my book has made me.’
With not much talent Stendhal willed himself into greatness, whilst Dickens was born with such staggering gifts, that most of the time he forgot to be a great writer, and shrank to a pantomime Balzac, who winks and grins, weeps and leers, and makes sure that his vapid lambs come off well and his vivid goats end in disgrace. Instead of unmasking ruthless bourgeois self-advancement for what it is, he robes it as a chivalrous crusade on behalf of the weak and voiceless.
19 Competence comes from mediocrity
It takes far more brains to be a mediocrity than to be a genius. And it takes a great deal more erudition to be a critic than to be a creator.
A mediocrity is more quick-witted and versatile than a first-rate mind.
To be competent and efficient, you need to have dull ideas or none at all. Talent ables, genius disables.
Those who never think have an answer for everything, and are never perplexed by anything. A middling mind knows just the right words to say in order to win over other middling minds. Shallow calleth unto shallow.
Now is a great time to be second-rate. The pay is enormous, and there will be no posterity to mock your insignificance. It is mediocrity that has the Midas touch.
20 Genius all at sea
A deep mind is dim where the rest of us scintillate, and would be stumped by the jobs that we get done with such ease. ‘Mine indeed is the mind of a very cretin,’ said Lao Tzu. Many first-rate geniuses have had third-rate minds. So I may be a genius after all.
Not being too clever is one of the lucky deficiencies that save genius from wasting its time on a special subject that needs a lot of brains and learning.
Great minds are just as unfit for tasks that are below them as small minds are for those that are above them. ‘When I am not original,’ Renard confessed, ‘I am stupid.’
A genius in a drawing room has to work so hard to seem like one of us, how could they think up witty things to say? ‘I live under an everlasting restraint,’ Keats confessed, ‘never relieved except when I am composing.’
21 A genius is not a universal mind
A profound intellect can do just one thing at a time, since so many things crowd in on its thoughts. ‘Beethoven can write music, but he can do nothing else on earth.’ A comprehensive mind is comprehensive only in its own small preserve, as Shakespeare was in poetry. Or if, like Leonardo, Goethe or Jefferson, they are proficient in a suite of them, they are so in just one compartment of each. ‘If you do one thing well,’ asked Thoreau, ‘what else are you good for?’ A great mind is a dunce in everything but its chosen metier.
Even the profoundest mind is like a coastal shelf. It is deep only here and there. For the most part it is as shallow as all the rest.
Most people have everything to live for. It’s only the few who have just one thing to live for that can make their lives count.
Narrow views make for broad competence. It takes a middling talent to do more than one thing expertly.
Genius can do things that are impossible for talent. But talent can do far more that are impossible for genius.
Genius itself may be just one of mediocrity’s more infrequent specializations.
The one way of becoming universal is to be, like Shakespeare, as little of an integrated person as you can. And what will last longest of you is what is least your own.
Mediocrities are fully present in all that they do. Only a small part of a genius is responsible for their work. The rest of it is made by the codes and traditions which absorb them.
22 Stupendous potential, mediocre actuality
We start out with miraculous potentialities, which we stunt by restricting them to such mean uses. ‘The youth,’ Thoreau says, ‘gets together his material to build a bridge to the moon, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.’ The mind is an intricate utensil, which most of us employ for no more exalted end than shelling peas. ‘To what base uses we put this ineffable intellect,’ lamented Emerson.
The world is a dazzling contraption which consumes all our craft to run it. We build up our most ingenious constructions, whether establishments, trade, science or statecraft, by elevating our elementary gifts to a high degree of mediocrity. How much skill, diligence and teamwork it takes to carry out all second-rate tasks. So is it any surprise that so few of us succeed in becoming even second-rate?
You need as much dedication to do a mediocre work as you would to do a marvellous one. We strain all our powers to do the most humdrum things. But how flabbily we exert our minds to do creative ones. Our best works alone fulfil the promise of our simplest gifts.
23 Genius and madness
Genius and madness are both closer to mediocrity than they are to each other. Genius nears insanity only when it has ceased to be what it is.
Madness may be more an effect of the kind of life that geniuses have to lead in order to do their great work than the cause that makes them able to do it.
The poet may be like a lunatic, but the lunatic is not in the least like a poet. Bold minds may be crazy, and yet the products of a bold mind are the antipodes of the tedious outpourings of craziness.
Mad people, like dreamers, have erratic but dingy visions. Like slovenly poets, they keep recycling stereotypes from the common stock. In the west they are all Jesus or Napoleon. Their fixations don’t open a door to wondrous truths. They are as predictable and repetitive as rats in a maze. Like the dull, they are freakish yet derivative. A mind working at highest pitch is unconventional yet archetypal.
24 The exception and the type
What is quintessential is often atypical. And the most distinctive comes in time to be the most emblematic. Greatness is singular in its very universality. The finest style is at once exemplary and inimitable. And the best writers indicate the typical by showing you the exceptional. Dickens’s characters are eccentric but not extraordinary, Shakespeare’s are extraordinary but not eccentric. Dickens constructs not characters but colourfully tinted wind-up toys, which he jerks into spasms of mechanical vivacity. But Shakespeare is the representative poet, who is therefore like no other poet.
To sum up in your modes of thought the spirit of your age, you would have to be a mediocrity. Only then would you be shallow enough for all its currents to come to the surface in you.
25 The small scorns the great
Who now holds great minds in awe? I pity them, since, unlike me, they are so inadequate to life that they have to compensate for their unfitness by growing desperately great. And we look with condescension on those turbulent germinal epochs which didn’t know how to husband their force so as to shrink to our snug and lucrative barrenness.
What great souls we must have, to be able to look down as from a lofty height on things that are so far above us. What a world, which makes beauty feel ashamed before ugliness, where the innocent are lashed by the self-righteous, in which stupidity condescends to intelligence, and where small minds grind down the great till they’re as small as themselves.
26 Too ignorant to envy
People don’t fear what they don’t know. If they did, what would they not have to be afraid of? And how could they fear it, when they don’t so much as know that they don’t know it? They snigger and scoff at what they have no grasp of, since they have too little respect for it to quaver at it. ‘All that seems strange we condemn,’ Montaigne says, ‘as well as all that we do not comprehend.’
Why would mediocrity envy merit? It’s too busy condescending to it and pitying it for its unfitness for life.
The small minds who are not worthy to untie the sandal strap of the great snicker at the great because their sandals are unstrapped.
We heap some of our most scathing disparagement on the great achievements that we are least worthy of. Few things fill the common run of people with more contempt than great art, as few things fill them with more true veneration than cheap kitsch.
Small minds see straight through great ones, since what is larger than themselves is invisible to them.
THE WORK IS ALL
27 Lives of the artists
We love geniuses where they are most like us, in their lives, where they are least like geniuses. Some of us can love art only by loving those who make it, as superstitious souls do homage to the trinity only in its saints.
Artists focus their force so narrowly in their works, what do they have to spare for life but their quite average drabness? ‘Great geniuses,’ as Emerson notes, ‘have the shortest biographies.’ A true artist leaves no memoirs. All that you need to know of artists’ lives will be clear from their work. And if they are real artists, that will be nothing at all. But we don’t care much for their works, though we love to hear one or two salacious titbits from their life.
The only people whose lives matter are the few whose lives matter less than their works.
Artists must live so many lives, that they don’t have much time for this one.
What ordinary people do is of more interest than what they are. But what artists make is of more interest than what they are, though this is the only thing about them that ordinary people are interested in.
Art ought to be anonymous, if only to remove the main reason for which most of it is made and bought.
The artist is a bundle of accidents who makes works the least detail of which seems inevitable and immutable.
28 The life is worth less than the work
The book lives a better and truer life than its author, more pure, quiet, proud and self-contained. And the poem leads a more resonant and spacious life than the cramped and insubstantial poet.
‘The work is all,’ as Flaubert said, ‘the person is nothing.’ The life is the husk which the work has no more need of. Nothing is more worthless than the personality of the artist, or more priceless than the work of art. Life is for consumers. Creators care for nothing but the work. The life was just a long mistake which they had to make so that the work might get done and which will soon be thankfully rubbed out by death.
29 The work is the true genius
The artist is a banal being, out of which art drags extraordinary works.
To judge the work by the life is the revenge of middle-class morality on aristocratic art. Art is an aristocratic pursuit. Morality is a bourgeois pretence. Religion is a plebeian consolation.
For those who have used life to some purpose death is the least of the evils that could come to them. For the makers death is no refutation. They lit out long ago, and what they leave for death is trash. Then they wake to live their real lives, unburdened of the day-to-day distractions of pain and joy.
The life goes out, the work remains. ‘The great use of life,’ as William James said, ‘is to spend it for something that will outlast it.’ But now we waste it to swipe our share of money and fun.
Good artists possess a talent, great ones are possessed by it. It works them as hard as it needs, and then casts them aside. That’s why they have such a thin self to give to the rest of life.
We each choose our prison. The artist must choose the one that sets the mind free to roam where it will.
30 Used up by the work
The writer is nothing, and becomes still more of a nothing by writing. Their work is a larva that lodges in their guts, and grows by feeding on them.
The work devours the soft pulp of its human maker, and turns it into the steel that it uses to carve out more works. The work is the end, its maker is a mere means. And the artist is a tool which is honed by making art, to the point where it starts to grow blunt and wear out.
How maimed and ugly you have to make your life, if you want to build up a work of perfect beauty.
A writer is a miserable contraption for turning out miraculous sentences, which malfunctions when put to work on life. But in our overeducated age writers are more fascinating and articulate than their works, and their biographies tell us more than their books.
Most of us have cheap substitutes for thinking so that we can live at ease. Thinkers are content with cheap substitutes for living so that they can think as they wish. You have to get hold of a few chattels that you don’t prize, so as to be free to risk all that you do prize. You have to learn to live safely, so that you can think dangerously.
Artists are interlopers in their own lives. They visit it once in a while to blow it up and gather more material to make their art.
31 Incredible artist
How could God be a credible artist, when he so far outshines his handiwork, and wants to be honoured more than his productions, and was so vastly pleased with what he had made? Would a human being not blush to have brought forth nothing more admirable than a jellyfish or a tapeworm? ‘If I had invented them,’ joked Twain, ‘I would go hide my head in a bag.’
God is too much the egotist to be an artist. His best work was a bad image of himself.
Artists aim to make a work better than themselves for the world to admire. But God is so vain that he was content to make a world so much worse than himself so that it would admire him.
32 Great works and little souls
The runners’ running is worth more than their immortal souls. And a few perfect but perishable sentences count for more than the writer’s immortal soul. Their bright achievements are washed clean of the pollution of their life and spirit. The immortal part of you is not the small thing that you are, but the great things that you make.
A work of art is worth far more than any mere soul that it might channel. Artists mean more than their lives but less than their works. And they grow as great as they are less than the works that spring from them. ‘Good artists,’ Wilde says, ‘exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.’ They make better than they are. The more fully they give form to their vision, the further they fall short of what they frame. And what they shape surpasses them even more than they surpass the rest of us.