Humphrey Trevelyan on Goethe
It seems that two qualities are necessary if an artist is to remain creative to the end of life; he must on the one hand retain an abnormally keen awareness of life, he must never grown complacent, never be content with life, must always demand the impossible and when he can not have it, must despair. The burden of the mystery must be with him day and night. He must be shaken by the naked truth that will not be comforted. This divine discontent, this disequilibrium, this state of inner tension is the source of artistic energy. Many lesser poets have it only in their youth; some even of the greatest lose it in middle life. Wordsworth lost the courage to despair and with it his poetic power. But more often the dynamic tensions are so powerful that they destroy the man before he reaches maturity.
We begin to die the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little when death intervenes before we can profit by experience. --Voltaire
All Heart, acrylic on cardboard, 14x18 in,
PERCEPTION IS ALL
How then shall we catch the flow and essence of life if not by thinking and the intellect? But is the intellect all? Let us for a while stop thinking, and just gaze upon that inner reality— our selves— which is better known to us than all things else: what do we see ? Mind, not matter; time, not space; action, not passivity; choice, not mechanism. --Henri Bergson