Only the individual who has never written and never dealt with images can say that there are no questions in his sphere, just a solid mass of answers...You are right to demand that an artist take a conscious attitude toward his work, but you confuse two concepts: resolving a question and posing a question correctly. Only the second is required of the artist. In Anna Karenina and Onegin not one question is resolved, but you are satisfied solely because all the questions in them are posed correctly.
- Anton Chekhov
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From the age of six I was in the habit of drawing all kinds of things. Although I had produced numerous designs by my fiftieth year, none of my works done before my seventieth is really worth counting. At the age of seventy-three I have come to understand the true form of animals, insects and fish and the nature of plants and trees. Consequently, by the age of eighty-six I will have made more and more progress, and at ninety I will have got closer to the essence of art. At the age of one hundred I will have reached a magnificent level and at one hundred and ten each dot and each line will be alive. I would like to ask those who outlive me to observe that I have not spoken without reason.
- Hokusai
Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Taint of the Schoolroom
Philip Lopate has called the personal essay the vision of middle age... I'd extend that statement by saying that any essay — personal, critical, expository — is more likely to be written by someone with a few gray hairs than by a twenty-five-year-old. (He's too busy finishing his first novel.) Activity and reflection tend to be sequential rather than simultaneous. And it takes at least a dozen years before the taint of the schoolroom—the "essay question," the college application "essay," the "essay on the principle exports of Bulgaria, due Thursday at 10:00," all of which have as much in common with an essay by Montaigne as a vitamin pill does with a chocolate truffle—wears off completely.
Ann Fadiman, in the introduction to Best American Essays 2003
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