Quotes come from this excerpt of a book:
Thinking back to all of the writers who started publishing around the same time as I did, there are so many whose voices I had thought would be the dominant ones for decades to come—yet they fell silent or, if not silent, never matched or in any way came close to the achievement for which they were earlier acclaimed. There are just as many others whose voices seemed negligible to me, whose work I’d still call unsurprising, yet it continues, like the writers themselves, to thrive and be published widely. And there is a third group, of modest accomplishment at the start, who have managed to differently surprise me by becoming better. I now see how much more powerful stamina can be than talent; or to say it another way, how powerless talent is, on its own, without stamina—rather like what is said about the body once the soul has left it, though I don’t believe in the soul. I do believe in stamina.
First, I wonder how many of those people who he thought were going to be big voices were people who had no support or the structures silenced them. How often do people fall silent because they have nowhere to go, no one to work with, and no safety net? It's more common than people would like to believe.
The same applies to the second and third group. How many of them were people who either had access (e.g., via nepotism) and didn't have to worry about anything? Who had extra support? How many of them had stable lives with few worries?
Having stamina is one thing, but talking about what allows us to have it is an entire other.
Take praise when and if you can get it, but don’t forget that it was never the point—or, if it was, then you’ve confused devotion with celebrity, which is a sometime by-product of the devotion that the committed making of art equals, but celebrity has nothing to do, in the end, with the making of art, let alone its value.
Something I wish more people would recognise. Trying to pull this status is a problem. We all have things to share, knowledge to spread, stories to tell. Why do so many focus on clout? On celebrity status? It's unnecessary.
There’s also a kind of stamina that doesn’t, initially, involve perspective at all, a stamina fueled by urgency, which is to stamina as adrenaline is to the body, enabling us, for a moment, to perform at levels we didn’t know we were capable of, or that we take at the time for granted.
True. There are a lot of times where I need to write, even if I don't end up publishing it.
Meanwhile, youth fades, as do the energies that came with it. So the challenge is how to maintain stamina, past youth, and without having to be routinely visited by crisis.
What about those of us who struggled through youth without the supports that others had? Some of us have and maintain the 'stamina' or 'energy', but we have no time. We have no focus because we're forced to put it elsewhere.
And why do we continue this thing of looking fondly back at youth? As if we have nothing to look forward to?
How to avoid repeating ourselves, how to keep seeing things anew, how to separate habit from habit’s predictability—and how to find the stamina to do so?
Why do we have to see everything anew? This presumes a requirement to be unique and different and... do something else. Sometimes it's okay to do the same thing twice. Or thrice. Maybe it'll be, as time goes on, inherently different.
Some of us have stories that we've been repeating forever simply because people won't listen.
