His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, comp
Sand on Chopin:
His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself. But then began the most heart-rending labour I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions, and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard; what he had conceived as a whole he analysed too much when wishing to write it, and his regret at not finding it again, in his opinion, clearly defined, threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page to write it at last as he had noted it down at the very first.
Flaubert on Flaubert:
Sometimes I don’t understand why my arms don’t drop from my body with fatigue, why my brain doesn’t melt away. I am leading an austere life, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained only by a kind of permanent frenzy, which sometimes makes me weep tears of impotence but never abates. I love my work with a love that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words don’t come, when I find I haven’t written a single sentence after scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed, bogged down in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for this demented pride that makes me pant after a chimera. A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.
It’s uncanny how much I—and, I assume, anyone doing creative work—can relate to, well, not the productivity and exquisiteness of genius, but the anguish inherent in the creative process. I saw a few bleak comments on how this book is demotivating, but I disagree: I found in the vastly diverse stories recounted a unifying element of solidarity. Life must revolve around something, and that it revolve around work can be deliciously painful.
“A quarter of an hour later, everything has changed; my heart is pounding with joy.” ...more