Can you ever?

Can you ever have enough beauty?  I think you probably can.  I feel sated with images, after having spent too long being distracted by the wonderful things I come across on the internet, knowing I should be elsewhere, doing elsethings.  I imagine thousands of us, hundreds of thousands of us , invisibly connected by the web, eyes and brains opened to new possibilities , engaged by the curiosities others have spent minutes, hours, days, lifetimes learning about , compiling.  When I was younger, I imagined myself to become a writer, most possibly a writer of fiction.  A figure quite solitary, compiling lives and landscapes.  As I grew, I read, and read. I read books everywhere I went, plundered libraries and bookshops, lost myself endlessly in other writers’ worlds.  And I forgot to write. One day , I remembered my aim had been to author my own fictional life, give birth to a volume of my own.  I was barren.  The seeds that were impanted in me were never fertilised. Even the life in the books I read began to stale, and it became harder to become lost in landscapes of literature. How does the imagination nurture itself, if not by immersing itself in the treasure trove of history and creativity?  Have I drowned my own imagination? Is it buried now, in depths and layers of others, unable to surface and breathe? Possibly, it is a thing apart from me, something I cannot drive, cannot control.  Perhaps I have to settle for the satisfaction of enjoying other peoples expressions of what it means to be here, in the present, perhaps the position of observer is not a purely passive one, but part of the whole of the creative process. We see what we want to see, hear the sublime in the artists musical vision, but it may be a different vision to the one he had.

When I started writing this today, I had come across this photographers time lapsed video, and loved it. And almost cried at the immensity of the project, the application of the human behind the work.  The care he had taken, the skills he had learnt along a lifetime to arrive at a level of skill which produced this short piece of loveliness.  How amazing is the human spirit, to continue to persevere through monotony, and difficulty, losses and frustration.  To create the slightest  work amongst the volume of human endeavour , to risk failure and humiliation, or simple dissatisfaction.  I applaud everyone who attempts the mastery of their interest, wherever that interest lies. I feel weak in comparison.

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