On the Creation of Art
It’s rare for me to aver anything with much confidence these days, so I hope I will be forgiven any taste of professorial arrogance here; it certainly sounds pretentious for anyone to make declarations about ‘true art’, whatever that’s supposed to be. However, having waded through the murky depth of its trappings, and then found terra firma, having been both guilty of its sins and redeemed by some of its virtues, I’ve been afforded a clarity on the subject which is rare for me, and therefore, perhaps, worth sharing. Along with about as many commas as I can cram into this thing.
Art is a subjective term, which has been used so generally as to encompass most of existence. I once heard that the study of stock market options was an art as well as a science. For that reason, the word is worthless unless we put it on the word-diet; forcing it to shed some pounds and regain a little definition to its shape. Rather than argue about what the word can mean, which stifles discussion, it would be more helpful to assign it a specific meaning. Let’s say, then, that art is an attempt to do at least one of two things: communicate, or beautify.
Those two impulses are related - they share a common ancestor, so they share a common trait. They are both essentially selfless acts. To seek honest communication is to hand a piece of one’s own self to another. It stems from a desire for connection, and therefore is hindered by any form of egotism, for ego perpetually stands as a wall between one person and the next. The urge to beautify has a similar sort of selflessness about it. For the person who values beauty, adding beauty to the world is a way of making it better. Because both traits are selfless, it is not inconsistent for me to say that true, honest art is always motivated by the greatest inspirer of selflessness: love.
I don’t mean that art is always about love. Strangely enough, not even all the ‘art’ that is about love is motivated by it. The spirit of art is one of selfless devotion; however, all forms of love have the ability to nourish as they tax, and art is no different. Art can therefore be a joyful shout into the darkness, and the friction of its effort can create warmth for one who toils at it. It is important to notice the aspect of devotion, because, as with the aspect of love, it is at odds with egotism. I will also point out that if the desire to beautify or communicate are in place, accessibility must be seen as a virtue of one’s work - however, that is a point to which I will return.
What of ego in art? To speak of art in its broader, flabbier sense, the word envelopes the fruits of all sorts of motivators other than love. First in line is ego. If one were to take all the musicians in the world, and, over their objections of bashfulness, force them to strip down to their naked motivations, the most common protrusion from which one would have to shield one’s eyes would be the desire for stardom. The artist who is motivated by a desire for fame is willing to give a piece of themselves to the world, but expects the world to give something back in return. It is completely natural for a person to want the thing they’ve created to be appreciated, but to create for the sake of being appreciated ceases to be an act of selfless love and becomes, instead, a strange sort of commerce. It is unfortunate to be such an artist, because the world has no interest in such an exchange, and while art for the sake of appreciation may require all the same hardships as art for the sake of others, it does not offer the nourishment that love affords its slaves. The artist who wishes to become famous will either fall into the big pile - obscure, and hungering after an acceptance or adoration that is not being offered, until finally succumbing to that reality and ‘giving up on the dream’, or the tiny pile - finding fame, but finding it to be insufficient. Either the star is needy of approval, in which case all the approval in the world will never be enough, or they are hoping to worship at the temple they’ve built for themselves, in which case they will atrophy.
There are some creative artists lucky enough to receive encouragement every step along the way, artists for whose work there is such enthusiasm that they always feel wanted and gratified. Such artists are afforded a certain level of freedom, because although they may be reliant upon such praise, they don’t feel as though they must pursue it. On one edge of this sword is the potential for insightful and honest work unfettered by a need to stand out or sell itself, on the other side is the temptation to settle into predictable mediocrity.
It’s possible that the desire for stardom is more prevalent among artists now than is historically typical. I will ascribe to this no sort of knee-jerk me-generation diagnosis, merely the fact that stardom is rubbed in the face of all potential artists during their formative years. It is ceaselessly paraded as the thing to which to aspire, the only true metric of success, and the ultimate purpose of art. There are commercial reasons why this is advantageous for certain organizations to perpetuate, which I won’t go into here.
In the public’s view of the artist, I imagine that at the opposite end of the spectrum from the starry-eyed teenager dreaming of Rolling Stone interviews lurks the brooding, standoffish avant garde genius whose tempestuous mind requires that he reimagine everything other artists take for granted. What of him? Where does art about art fit into things?
Some artists are compelled to push the boundaries of their medium. This can be for three reasons. The first is that the artist feels that the expectations of their art form are too constricting for them to communicate what they need to, or convey the beauty they imagine. They must tailor, slice at, or even partially undress of their medium in order to gain the range of motion necessary to move as they like. A good example of this is Beethoven. To mix metaphors, and smuggle half the world’s supply of commas through your screen, let’s say that such an artist often leaves the door open behind them a little. This generates the second type of art-expanding artist, who is exploring possibilities not because they must, but merely because they can. The second reason, therefore, is curiosity. Such an artist is seduced forth by the artistic possibilities left available by another. After the Beatles helped to found a new musical continent, hundreds of other artists rushed in to settle it. But, unfortunately, Yoko forever scratches at the band’s door, which brings us to our third distinction. The third reason an artist may try to push the boundaries of their medium (and here is where the phrase ‘reimagine’ is most likely to be applied) is for novelty’s sake. This artist, the aforementioned brooder, is seeking to shock, surprise, or unhinge their audience. Such an undertaking is almost exclusively undertaken as an act of egotism rather than love, for the act of doing something different has no inherent value when divorced from the artist’s awareness of themselves. The artist creating bold new art for the sake of creating bold new art is merely decorating an empty chalice. The impulse is born of the need to matter. It is no less hollow a pursuit than needing to be appreciated as a star, and will offer no more satisfaction.
It’s interesting that artists in that third category are likely to eschew accessibility in their work, when they are still reliant upon the approval of others. It might come from a desire to distance themselves from the majority of artists, and thereby stand out more noticeably. Most artists value accessibility, either because they hope to be appreciated, or because accessibility is necessarily a virtue in the selfless toil of communicating with or beautifying the world. A true artist mustn’t be bound by artistic politics, worries about their perception in the public eye, or how fashionable their work is. Their goal is to hand something cherished as directly as possible to the person, the deity, or the world that they love. Accessibility is merely directness of route; so long as the route does not damage the cargo, the most direct route is desirable.
A lack of accessibility has crippled several media over the last several decades, two of which are poetry and music of the classical genres. The desire for significance by virtue of one’s novelty - to be the composer who created a fascinating new way to play a flute, or to be the poet who wrote a poem of such exquisite equivocation that nobody could tell you what the dickens it’s about - is an adolescent impulse. One expects it in beginning artists suffering the Dunning Kruger effect; novelty is the necessary ideal of someone who wishes to stand out before they learn to excel within their discipline. However, when such artists grab the reigns of artistic politics, the results can be disastrous for the art form overall. The public becomes despondent and disinterested, because the art they’re seeing isn’t really for them. There was anger at the first performance of 4’33”. There is a price to such disenfranchisement of the public, for each medium is its own separate language, and like a language, it can fall out of use if nobody is inclined to speak it. The sun set on the era of poetry being accessible, skillful, and popular, to make room for the era in which the only works being published detested such popular clichés as rhyme and story, and sought instead to reimagine poetry as a ceaseless string of vague hints at elusive feelings, all chopped cruelly into arrhythmic stanzas. The skills developed by previous generations were largely forgotten during this period of indulgent elitism. When the sun rose again, and publishers were no longer under the thrall of radical modernism, the public had ceased reading poetry. It shall return to reading poetry again, I’m sure, but there is a break in the art’s evolution: the poetry people read tomorrow will not be the child of W H Davies, but of the clumsier slam poets who are now slowly giving way to poetry readings.
As I mentioned, the same fate befell music of the classical genres. There is good classical music being produced today, but true dedication is required to find any of it. Why is that, when we used to celebrate our composers? I would posit that after decades of being scared away from its pursuit of modern classical music by composers who thought accessibility, melody, and beauty were conceits of a decadent medium, the public ceased conversing with classical music for so long that it lost its fluency. Once again, we may see a break in evolution. The classical composers the world celebrates tomorrow may indeed owe more to Mansell or John Williams than to Part.
I understand that I’ve put forth a strict definition of art, and then systematically cut from it innumerable works. If Cage, Ono, and Warhol aren’t art, what are they? It seems exceedingly problematic to start referring to some art as good and other art as bad; I would much rather say some work is honest art, and some work is merely an alloy thereof. A desire to communicate mixed heavily with a desire to be respected or revered. A desire to beautify the world diluted by a hunger for personal significance. They may have an artistic glimmer, but they are not purely art. Perhaps it seems vain to make such a distinction, but I have a reason for it. Nothing I’ve mentioned has any value whatsoever from the standpoint of artistic appreciation or appraisal. One may find personal value in the most cynical money-grab or ego-crutch; there are millions who buy boyband albums, after all. Anywhere value can be found, however incidental, let it be enjoyed. While it seems that this severe definition of art is meant to exclude and subdivide extant works, it has no such intended practical merit as a means of art critique. I only put it forward because such an ideal is but a whisper under the roar of fame-seekers and curiosity-inventers. This definition of art is not meant to aid the art critic, but the artist.
Galahad had the strength of ten because his heart was pure. It is beside the point that the world might benefit if artists were brought up with at least the idea, if not the ideal, of art without the artist in the way. Artists that hope neither for applause, nor reverence, nor fortune, but merely seek to comfort and whisper secrets to the world they love. I don’t hope to direct art, merely protect artists. The artist who labours for fame or reverence will starve in pursuit of those mirages, the artist who suffers ‘for the art’ may find that the target is too large and impersonal to be worthy of the hardship. As I said, love has the ability to nourish as it taxes. The life of a creative artist has enough difficulty without the wasting disease of fame-envy. It provides enough frustration without the need to call oneself an important artist. To find the alacrity and passion to survive as an artist, this is the best advice I can give: find a specific person to whom to write, for whom to compose, for whom to paint, for whom to beautify existence. Release your work to the world, but have in mind the enrichment of your devotee’s world, specifically. That level of personal intimacy will weed out the egotism that seeps in when larger targets are in mind: when one creates for the world at large, one is are more likely to fall into a desire for world-renown than the person who creates for a small handful of specific people, for instance. It used to be common for people to create for the glorification of God, which may have a similar sort of intimacy of devotion, but I wouldn’t recommend God as a beneficiary over an individual; God, presumably, doesn’t need your glorification. One chief source of nourishment for the artist who devotes themselves to a specific beneficiary (keep in mind that the target of their devotion may change from opus to opus), is the feeling of necessity. One must feel one’s work is needed, which is a terribly difficult thing of which to convince oneself when considering art on a global scale. We may all agree that humankind needs music, for instance, but you would have a hard time convincing me that it needs me to write it one more folk song. It has been said that the person who has a ‘why’ can withstand any ‘how’, but the necessity of one’s work is of little value if it’s an academic belief - it must be felt.
What about creating art because art is good? One may eventually lose any sense of urgency and necessity if one creates art merely for its own sake. Although one may be highly motivated to work on a project because of one’s enthusiasm for its merits, upon its completion the artist may feel adrift, as if the opus is an orphan child now waiting for adoption by an appreciative world. When repeated, this process of production followed by anticlimax will have a wearying and possibly isolating effect on the artist. The growing collection of unseen masterpieces will beg for a purpose, and thwart the enthusiasm for further creation; without a devotee, it will be exceedingly difficult for the artist to see a new creative undertaking as being anything more than an addition to a locked gallery. (The isolating effect will occur if they come to associate with their art, in which case they will feel that they are locked inside the gallery with it.) Once again, although one shouldn’t seek nourishment in the creation of art for selfish utilitarian reasons such as self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, or personal validation, one still needs to feel that their art has a purpose.
As I said, the necessity of one’s work must be felt. For the artist who creates in order to edify their intended audience, that feeling can be difficult to maintain. While they may academically understand that their audience will be better off when so enlightened, they will likely be frustrated by this ambition. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to convince anyone of anything meaningful through art; the average fan will appreciate the sentiments with which they agree and dismiss those with which they don’t. In the pop genres of music, this fact is leaned on heavily, for the vast majority of songs that are trying to make a point seek only to make a point with which everyone already agrees (such as “love should be a priority”, or “peace is worthwhile”). If engaged either in teaching that which is already known, or pressing a point that is not getting meaningfully absorbed, the principle that one’s work is necessary will be eroded by the personal feeling that it is not.
For those reasons, when choosing a person for whom to create, don’t elect one on the basis of their need for your enlightenment. You should not be trying to improve them, but improving their world. Share your experiences to expand their world, capture and convey beauty to adorn their world, hand them a piece of your heart so that their world is not as lonely as you have often known yours to be. Sing into the darkness so that they may hear your voice and be comforted, or so they may follow its sound and find some of the treasures you’ve found, but don’t yell instructions for how they should improve the world. The purpose of this advice is not their benefit, which should become your interest, but yours, which may eventually cease to be.
Art is a subjective term, which has been used so generally as to encompass most of existence. I once heard that the study of stock market options was an art as well as a science. For that reason, the word is worthless unless we put it on the word-diet; forcing it to shed some pounds and regain a little definition to its shape. Rather than argue about what the word can mean, which stifles discussion, it would be more helpful to assign it a specific meaning. Let’s say, then, that art is an attempt to do at least one of two things: communicate, or beautify.
Those two impulses are related - they share a common ancestor, so they share a common trait. They are both essentially selfless acts. To seek honest communication is to hand a piece of one’s own self to another. It stems from a desire for connection, and therefore is hindered by any form of egotism, for ego perpetually stands as a wall between one person and the next. The urge to beautify has a similar sort of selflessness about it. For the person who values beauty, adding beauty to the world is a way of making it better. Because both traits are selfless, it is not inconsistent for me to say that true, honest art is always motivated by the greatest inspirer of selflessness: love.
I don’t mean that art is always about love. Strangely enough, not even all the ‘art’ that is about love is motivated by it. The spirit of art is one of selfless devotion; however, all forms of love have the ability to nourish as they tax, and art is no different. Art can therefore be a joyful shout into the darkness, and the friction of its effort can create warmth for one who toils at it. It is important to notice the aspect of devotion, because, as with the aspect of love, it is at odds with egotism. I will also point out that if the desire to beautify or communicate are in place, accessibility must be seen as a virtue of one’s work - however, that is a point to which I will return.
What of ego in art? To speak of art in its broader, flabbier sense, the word envelopes the fruits of all sorts of motivators other than love. First in line is ego. If one were to take all the musicians in the world, and, over their objections of bashfulness, force them to strip down to their naked motivations, the most common protrusion from which one would have to shield one’s eyes would be the desire for stardom. The artist who is motivated by a desire for fame is willing to give a piece of themselves to the world, but expects the world to give something back in return. It is completely natural for a person to want the thing they’ve created to be appreciated, but to create for the sake of being appreciated ceases to be an act of selfless love and becomes, instead, a strange sort of commerce. It is unfortunate to be such an artist, because the world has no interest in such an exchange, and while art for the sake of appreciation may require all the same hardships as art for the sake of others, it does not offer the nourishment that love affords its slaves. The artist who wishes to become famous will either fall into the big pile - obscure, and hungering after an acceptance or adoration that is not being offered, until finally succumbing to that reality and ‘giving up on the dream’, or the tiny pile - finding fame, but finding it to be insufficient. Either the star is needy of approval, in which case all the approval in the world will never be enough, or they are hoping to worship at the temple they’ve built for themselves, in which case they will atrophy.
There are some creative artists lucky enough to receive encouragement every step along the way, artists for whose work there is such enthusiasm that they always feel wanted and gratified. Such artists are afforded a certain level of freedom, because although they may be reliant upon such praise, they don’t feel as though they must pursue it. On one edge of this sword is the potential for insightful and honest work unfettered by a need to stand out or sell itself, on the other side is the temptation to settle into predictable mediocrity.
It’s possible that the desire for stardom is more prevalent among artists now than is historically typical. I will ascribe to this no sort of knee-jerk me-generation diagnosis, merely the fact that stardom is rubbed in the face of all potential artists during their formative years. It is ceaselessly paraded as the thing to which to aspire, the only true metric of success, and the ultimate purpose of art. There are commercial reasons why this is advantageous for certain organizations to perpetuate, which I won’t go into here.
In the public’s view of the artist, I imagine that at the opposite end of the spectrum from the starry-eyed teenager dreaming of Rolling Stone interviews lurks the brooding, standoffish avant garde genius whose tempestuous mind requires that he reimagine everything other artists take for granted. What of him? Where does art about art fit into things?
Some artists are compelled to push the boundaries of their medium. This can be for three reasons. The first is that the artist feels that the expectations of their art form are too constricting for them to communicate what they need to, or convey the beauty they imagine. They must tailor, slice at, or even partially undress of their medium in order to gain the range of motion necessary to move as they like. A good example of this is Beethoven. To mix metaphors, and smuggle half the world’s supply of commas through your screen, let’s say that such an artist often leaves the door open behind them a little. This generates the second type of art-expanding artist, who is exploring possibilities not because they must, but merely because they can. The second reason, therefore, is curiosity. Such an artist is seduced forth by the artistic possibilities left available by another. After the Beatles helped to found a new musical continent, hundreds of other artists rushed in to settle it. But, unfortunately, Yoko forever scratches at the band’s door, which brings us to our third distinction. The third reason an artist may try to push the boundaries of their medium (and here is where the phrase ‘reimagine’ is most likely to be applied) is for novelty’s sake. This artist, the aforementioned brooder, is seeking to shock, surprise, or unhinge their audience. Such an undertaking is almost exclusively undertaken as an act of egotism rather than love, for the act of doing something different has no inherent value when divorced from the artist’s awareness of themselves. The artist creating bold new art for the sake of creating bold new art is merely decorating an empty chalice. The impulse is born of the need to matter. It is no less hollow a pursuit than needing to be appreciated as a star, and will offer no more satisfaction.
It’s interesting that artists in that third category are likely to eschew accessibility in their work, when they are still reliant upon the approval of others. It might come from a desire to distance themselves from the majority of artists, and thereby stand out more noticeably. Most artists value accessibility, either because they hope to be appreciated, or because accessibility is necessarily a virtue in the selfless toil of communicating with or beautifying the world. A true artist mustn’t be bound by artistic politics, worries about their perception in the public eye, or how fashionable their work is. Their goal is to hand something cherished as directly as possible to the person, the deity, or the world that they love. Accessibility is merely directness of route; so long as the route does not damage the cargo, the most direct route is desirable.
A lack of accessibility has crippled several media over the last several decades, two of which are poetry and music of the classical genres. The desire for significance by virtue of one’s novelty - to be the composer who created a fascinating new way to play a flute, or to be the poet who wrote a poem of such exquisite equivocation that nobody could tell you what the dickens it’s about - is an adolescent impulse. One expects it in beginning artists suffering the Dunning Kruger effect; novelty is the necessary ideal of someone who wishes to stand out before they learn to excel within their discipline. However, when such artists grab the reigns of artistic politics, the results can be disastrous for the art form overall. The public becomes despondent and disinterested, because the art they’re seeing isn’t really for them. There was anger at the first performance of 4’33”. There is a price to such disenfranchisement of the public, for each medium is its own separate language, and like a language, it can fall out of use if nobody is inclined to speak it. The sun set on the era of poetry being accessible, skillful, and popular, to make room for the era in which the only works being published detested such popular clichés as rhyme and story, and sought instead to reimagine poetry as a ceaseless string of vague hints at elusive feelings, all chopped cruelly into arrhythmic stanzas. The skills developed by previous generations were largely forgotten during this period of indulgent elitism. When the sun rose again, and publishers were no longer under the thrall of radical modernism, the public had ceased reading poetry. It shall return to reading poetry again, I’m sure, but there is a break in the art’s evolution: the poetry people read tomorrow will not be the child of W H Davies, but of the clumsier slam poets who are now slowly giving way to poetry readings.
As I mentioned, the same fate befell music of the classical genres. There is good classical music being produced today, but true dedication is required to find any of it. Why is that, when we used to celebrate our composers? I would posit that after decades of being scared away from its pursuit of modern classical music by composers who thought accessibility, melody, and beauty were conceits of a decadent medium, the public ceased conversing with classical music for so long that it lost its fluency. Once again, we may see a break in evolution. The classical composers the world celebrates tomorrow may indeed owe more to Mansell or John Williams than to Part.
I understand that I’ve put forth a strict definition of art, and then systematically cut from it innumerable works. If Cage, Ono, and Warhol aren’t art, what are they? It seems exceedingly problematic to start referring to some art as good and other art as bad; I would much rather say some work is honest art, and some work is merely an alloy thereof. A desire to communicate mixed heavily with a desire to be respected or revered. A desire to beautify the world diluted by a hunger for personal significance. They may have an artistic glimmer, but they are not purely art. Perhaps it seems vain to make such a distinction, but I have a reason for it. Nothing I’ve mentioned has any value whatsoever from the standpoint of artistic appreciation or appraisal. One may find personal value in the most cynical money-grab or ego-crutch; there are millions who buy boyband albums, after all. Anywhere value can be found, however incidental, let it be enjoyed. While it seems that this severe definition of art is meant to exclude and subdivide extant works, it has no such intended practical merit as a means of art critique. I only put it forward because such an ideal is but a whisper under the roar of fame-seekers and curiosity-inventers. This definition of art is not meant to aid the art critic, but the artist.
Galahad had the strength of ten because his heart was pure. It is beside the point that the world might benefit if artists were brought up with at least the idea, if not the ideal, of art without the artist in the way. Artists that hope neither for applause, nor reverence, nor fortune, but merely seek to comfort and whisper secrets to the world they love. I don’t hope to direct art, merely protect artists. The artist who labours for fame or reverence will starve in pursuit of those mirages, the artist who suffers ‘for the art’ may find that the target is too large and impersonal to be worthy of the hardship. As I said, love has the ability to nourish as it taxes. The life of a creative artist has enough difficulty without the wasting disease of fame-envy. It provides enough frustration without the need to call oneself an important artist. To find the alacrity and passion to survive as an artist, this is the best advice I can give: find a specific person to whom to write, for whom to compose, for whom to paint, for whom to beautify existence. Release your work to the world, but have in mind the enrichment of your devotee’s world, specifically. That level of personal intimacy will weed out the egotism that seeps in when larger targets are in mind: when one creates for the world at large, one is are more likely to fall into a desire for world-renown than the person who creates for a small handful of specific people, for instance. It used to be common for people to create for the glorification of God, which may have a similar sort of intimacy of devotion, but I wouldn’t recommend God as a beneficiary over an individual; God, presumably, doesn’t need your glorification. One chief source of nourishment for the artist who devotes themselves to a specific beneficiary (keep in mind that the target of their devotion may change from opus to opus), is the feeling of necessity. One must feel one’s work is needed, which is a terribly difficult thing of which to convince oneself when considering art on a global scale. We may all agree that humankind needs music, for instance, but you would have a hard time convincing me that it needs me to write it one more folk song. It has been said that the person who has a ‘why’ can withstand any ‘how’, but the necessity of one’s work is of little value if it’s an academic belief - it must be felt.
What about creating art because art is good? One may eventually lose any sense of urgency and necessity if one creates art merely for its own sake. Although one may be highly motivated to work on a project because of one’s enthusiasm for its merits, upon its completion the artist may feel adrift, as if the opus is an orphan child now waiting for adoption by an appreciative world. When repeated, this process of production followed by anticlimax will have a wearying and possibly isolating effect on the artist. The growing collection of unseen masterpieces will beg for a purpose, and thwart the enthusiasm for further creation; without a devotee, it will be exceedingly difficult for the artist to see a new creative undertaking as being anything more than an addition to a locked gallery. (The isolating effect will occur if they come to associate with their art, in which case they will feel that they are locked inside the gallery with it.) Once again, although one shouldn’t seek nourishment in the creation of art for selfish utilitarian reasons such as self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, or personal validation, one still needs to feel that their art has a purpose.
As I said, the necessity of one’s work must be felt. For the artist who creates in order to edify their intended audience, that feeling can be difficult to maintain. While they may academically understand that their audience will be better off when so enlightened, they will likely be frustrated by this ambition. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly difficult to convince anyone of anything meaningful through art; the average fan will appreciate the sentiments with which they agree and dismiss those with which they don’t. In the pop genres of music, this fact is leaned on heavily, for the vast majority of songs that are trying to make a point seek only to make a point with which everyone already agrees (such as “love should be a priority”, or “peace is worthwhile”). If engaged either in teaching that which is already known, or pressing a point that is not getting meaningfully absorbed, the principle that one’s work is necessary will be eroded by the personal feeling that it is not.
For those reasons, when choosing a person for whom to create, don’t elect one on the basis of their need for your enlightenment. You should not be trying to improve them, but improving their world. Share your experiences to expand their world, capture and convey beauty to adorn their world, hand them a piece of your heart so that their world is not as lonely as you have often known yours to be. Sing into the darkness so that they may hear your voice and be comforted, or so they may follow its sound and find some of the treasures you’ve found, but don’t yell instructions for how they should improve the world. The purpose of this advice is not their benefit, which should become your interest, but yours, which may eventually cease to be.