Originally Posted by Crowbob

Interesting topic.

I think most normal people stumble upon something and become inspired by it. By normal I mean people who are not prodigies, who are not born with innate ability. This has been my experience.

My mother was a painter, among other things. One of my earliest memories, as a toddler, is of me watching her paint a mural. To this day, I remember my confusion while trying to comprehend the purple bunch of grapes on the wall that were not grapes. So naturally I’ve always had an artistic bent and was actually pretty proud of my work. Until my first visit to the DIA (Detroit Institue of Art) on a junior high field trip.

What I felt while absorbing the most beautiful and awesome sculptures and paintings I later learned was agitation. I became agitated. I had not known humanity could produce such things. They made me nervous. They made me sad. They made me realize the futility of my own drawing and my own painting and my own music-making

Over the years, say at a concert or wandering around Florence and Rome, or becoming lost in Hemingway or Dostoyevsky I often wondered what is the point of my even trying to paint or write or make music or whatever endeavor I was inexorably compelled to do.

I would get to a certain level of proficiency, or command of the medium or shiver at the words I had written because of their profundity. And then suddenly, and always, become disgusted by it. Repulsed. Loathing at the idea that I had deluded myself into thinking I could create something great.

Until one day I began seeing these great works by Michelangelo, Mozart, and Melville not as challenges but rather as gifts.

As I’ve grown older I’ve become more comfortable accepting that any greatness in me is in my appreciation of greatness, now that my own dreams of it have evaporated. For me having the intellect and emotional capacity to understand the greatness of others has allowed me license to make, perform or write good enough.