Sunday, March 18, 2007
Lovely Sentiments
I'm still making my way through Julia Cameron's "Letters to a Young Artist." I ran across a couple of lovely sentiments while reading last night.
From page 107: "It's a gread deal like the question of love. Either we can worry about being loved "enough" or we can focus on being more loving. Only one of those choices will make us happy."
From page 113: "I do believe that we encounter the consciousness of an artist through his or her work. Sometimes some of my liveliest relationships are with people whom I may never meet at all except on the page."
The first is self-explanatory. The second makes me wonder if this is why we become so enamored with famous people. Their work precedes them and we get this lovely snippet of the best of them - the nugget of gold inside upon which we build our ideas of them. If / when we meet these famous people or continue to watch their antics through the media, our ideas of them evaporate because we eventually discover their human qualities. The gold is still there, but it's been sullied. Meeting them on the page, or through a song, or in a movie and building our ideas of them through the prism of our hearts and minds creates the ideal relationship, one that cannot be fulfilled in real life, unless our imaginations are willing to accept their humanity.
From page 107: "It's a gread deal like the question of love. Either we can worry about being loved "enough" or we can focus on being more loving. Only one of those choices will make us happy."
From page 113: "I do believe that we encounter the consciousness of an artist through his or her work. Sometimes some of my liveliest relationships are with people whom I may never meet at all except on the page."
The first is self-explanatory. The second makes me wonder if this is why we become so enamored with famous people. Their work precedes them and we get this lovely snippet of the best of them - the nugget of gold inside upon which we build our ideas of them. If / when we meet these famous people or continue to watch their antics through the media, our ideas of them evaporate because we eventually discover their human qualities. The gold is still there, but it's been sullied. Meeting them on the page, or through a song, or in a movie and building our ideas of them through the prism of our hearts and minds creates the ideal relationship, one that cannot be fulfilled in real life, unless our imaginations are willing to accept their humanity.
Labels: artist, books, fame, humanity, idea, julia cameron, love, reading
