Canto

When a child draws, he doesn't intend to distort, but to set down exactly what he sees. And as his gaze is direct, he sees the lines that create motion.

—Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners (paraphrased)
As a writer, she intends to see the lines of spiritual motion.

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Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

—Wendell Berry, "Christianity and The Survival of Creation”,
via Alan Jacobs
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Curiosity reflects a willingness to be disappointed in a search for knowledge.

—Wonderbook, Chapter 1: Inspiration and the Creative Life,
Jeff VanderMeer

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the problem of writing is always the problem of who you were...

—M. John Harrison

There are ideas that call us and leave, like the beating of wings on a window during the night.

—Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Don Colacho)
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The artist does not compete with his fellow artists; he does battle with his angel.

—Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Don Colacho)
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And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

—"Ode",
Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844–1881

a man of talent is condemned to live is dull and stupid, the artist is, unconsciously to himself, haunted by a sensation of morbid yearning for another century… In some cases, it is a return to past ages, to vanished civilizations, to dead centuries; in others, it is an impulse towards the fantastic, the land of dreams, it is a vision more or less vivid of a time to come whose images reproduce, without his being aware, as a result of atavism, that of by-gone epochs.

(...or, in these days, yearning for a future history that never will be, save in dreaming...)

— J. K. Huysmans, “Against the Grain” (1926)

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