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5

The Unwavering Beacon

The inviolable imperative of excellence

‘In art, the best is good enough.’ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

‘An artist cannot do anything slovenly.’ Jane Austen

OUR FEELINGS ABOUT any work we create wax and wane. Some days we are filled with enthusiasm for it; other days it seems dull and lifeless. Some nights I will go to bed excited about what I left unfinished only to wake in the morning and find it insipid and incoherent. In the same fashion, I will discard a work as turgid or fragmentary, only to go back to it several months later and find a beauty in it that leaves me wondering what it was that had caused me to discard it in the first place.

We are often the worst judges of our own work. Either we see its deficiencies in high relief or we overestimate its capacity to express what we set out to reveal. We are too close to it and too invested in it to see its strengths and weaknesses.