Month: May 2013

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art.

I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn’t matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art. …

[W]hile you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right. …

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.
Neil Gaiman

Today, for the first time in a longish while, I wish I could go home.

This Is Water

10 May 2013 / Anamaria

I have read/watched/listened to this speech so many times. When I find myself falling into a “I am the center of the universe, everyone else is stupid.” frame of mind, I repeat to myself: “This is water. This is water.” I remind myself to be aware; to be “conscious…enough to choose what [I] pay attention to and to choose how [I] construct meaning from experience.” ” To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” I think about how I want to live my life and what I choose to give meaning to and try to remember that the “really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” All of these things, and more, are encapsulated in these three words that I whisper: “This is water. This is water.”

This speech also contains the best, most lucid argument I have ever heard for believing in God: “…in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” (This part is not in the excerpted video version, but you can read it in the full transcript.) I am still not fully convinced, but if anything is going to tip the scales, I think this is it, because it’s true that we all believe in something and I would rather consciously choose what I believe in and not fall into belief through habit and routine.

I recently read a biography of David Foster Wallace. Of course I knew how it was going to end. Yet somehow I was still shocked when the inescapable end arrived. And I was unspeakably sad. I have purposely not read all his works so that I can save some for later, so that there can be a bit more DFW in my future.

To be, in a word, unborable…. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
David Foster Wallace