In Which I Expose an Eternal Predicament:

Or, The Problem of Showing Your Work to Other People.

It has much to do with telling stories. It has everything to do with telling stories. And I feel much of today’s youth suffer from the same disability – for it is the worst kind of crippling, to be unable to express the expressible when one is of sound mind, with their brain neatly wired.

Yet one feels they can only do so if everything is worded with exact precision. One halts, if the work is not beautiful, if one feels their highest of friends will dislike it. Worse yet, one thinks of the critics! All this without having made a name for oneself, looking too far into future or fantasy.

One thinks others will call him vacuous, a hack: one who borrows too much, and too obviously, for each artist is a thief in the first place. If they weren’t, we’d have no symbols to play with. But there is such thing as being too crude. It would be impolite to sew others’ rough cuts together and pass it on as a work of art, without polishing or curing or changing the colour. One fears he’ll be discovered, and never be read again, unless the work in question is not only awful but ridiculously so.

Then one’s acquaintances may pass it among each other not to laugh with, but to laugh at. At least in this case minor fame is achieved, though some would say that this is not a good thing.

One must dispose of this sentiment.

It is that which freezes the soldier in his tracks, knee-deep in mud, to be reached by shrapnel, shot by Jerry, have their trench collapse and eat him whole. It is the cause of the unsent letter, of the fact that very few masterpieces are produced by the young talents, this day and age. It cannot be reduced to mere “lack of expertise” -- I say it is reduced to two things: cowardice, that fear of being disposed of; or Indolence, the Twenty-first Century’s capital virtue. In many cases, it is both.

Because who would sit down to work, knowing it is for nothing?

Yet such a view is unfit of an Alexander. (And I do believe that some of us think ourselves as Alexandroi. But now I am being pompous.)

So far I have identified the problem, but never how to purge it fatally. O, Anxiety! Separation anxiety, the woes of withdrawal, fear of public speaking, fear of the dark, fear of live wires. The shape I speak of is one among many others, and in the end it could be said they are all alike. It cripples from the neck down – and often those to reassure a prospective artist (that is, one who does not know if he should be called one at all) are the ones to harm him the most, to urge confidence’s retreat: they are the ones to say that everything is correct, that one’s writing is perfect, that soon they will be published, and so on.

Are they deceiving the artist-to-be? Surely, they are not being malicious, unless they have a personal enmity or are ones to see people as playthings, and should not have been asked in the first place.

Are they sorry for him?

Or is it simply that they know nothing of books at all?

That is a question for the ever-favourable critic. And I do not think they’d answer.