Cool opening quote...
The disadvantages and
dangers of the author's calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make
all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant. It
gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of
creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity and terror, which
Aristotle tells us is the object of art. For his sins and his follies, the
unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love, his physical defects,
illness, privation, his hopes abandoned, his griefs, humiliations, everything is
transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it.
Everything is grist to his mill, from the glimpse of a face in the street to a
war that convulses the civilized world, from the scent of a rose to the death of
a friend. Nothing befalls him that he cannot transmute into a stanza, a song or
a story, and having done this be rid of it. The artist is the only free
man.
--W.
Somerset Maugham,
The Summing
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Posted: Mon - September 29, 2003 at 01:13 AM