Walter Bagehot — Persistence

Harley King

Conversation is becoming a lost art.  People pass each other like shadows in the night, absorbed in their small worlds.  We seldom listen to the stories that people have to share about their lives.  We have little time for family and friends and rarely do we risk speaking to strangers.

Growing up in a small midwestern farming community, we left our doors unlocked and our cars running when we went to the post office.  Everybody knew everyone else and rarely did we meet a stranger.  Our conversations were filled with stories, gossip and laughter.

Yet, today I live in a much different world.  I lock the doors of my car even when it sits in my driveway and I always lock the doors of my house even when I am home.  And most of the people I meet are strangers and rarely do we speak.

Life is about the relationships we develop with family, friends and even strangers on the paths that we choose to travel.  Some of the best conversations that I have had in my life have happened on an airplane with someone I had never met and will never encounter again.  

With strangers, we often open up and share our stories in ways that we do not with family and friends.  We know that the strangers are passing through our lives and that it is unlikely that we will meet again.  When we listen to stories of strangers, there is so much we can learn about the world and the people that inhabit it.  We will often find that we are alike and have much in common.

Listening to the stories of others can spark our creativity and make us better writers and artists.  Something they say may plant a seed that will grow and bear fruit.  Something they say may free us from the chains that bind our thinking.  Listening to the stories of strangers will give us small moments of pleasure and joy.

A. E. Housman

"Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out . . . Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure."

— A. E. Housman

English Poet

1859 - 1936

Many poets and painters dislike it when they are asked to explain the meaning of their poems or paintings.  "If I have to explain it to you, then why did I bother creating it."  While poems and paintings may have meaning, we don't have to understand them perfectly to appreciate them.  Sometimes the pleasure is in the sounds or the colors.  And that is all we need.  Pleasure is more important than perfect understanding.  None of us fully understand the world, but we still find pleasure in it.

Here is a poem by A. E. Housman.

Loveliest of Trees

by A. E. Housman

Loveliests of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

Dean Koontz

"Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled.  Pleasure and pain.  Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled."

— Dean Koontz

American Novelist

1945 -

I love the images conjured up by this quote.  Pain and pleasure is basically what life is all about.  Why should creative work be any different?  We experience both pain and pleasure while doing creative work — painting, writing, singing or dancing.  Hopefully, you experience more pleasure than pain.  One cannot exist without the other and both teach us something.