From “The Noble Truths of Suffering”, a short story by Aleksander Hemon.
Dick Macalister, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, it talking to a younger writer in a bar (the young writer is the voice):
When he was young, like me, he said, he had thought that all the great writers knew something he didn’t. He’d thought that if he read their books he would learn something, get better. He’d thought that he would acquire what those writers had: the wisdom, the truth, the wholeness, the real shit. He had been burning to write, hungry for that knowledge. But now he knew that that hunger was vainglorious; now he knew that writers knew nothing, really—most of them were just faking it. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know, nothing on the other side. There was no walker, no path, just walking. This was it, whoever you were, wherever you were, whatever it was, and you had to make peace with that fact.
I love that (“There was no walker, no path, just walking.”) and find it is true for me and my own art journey (sort of, anyway — I have obviously been inspired and have learnt a lot from other artists, old and new).
What do YOU think?
