The past couple of weeks the perils of being an artist have nibbled on the edges of my thoughts. While there is a tremendous excitement in expressing one's creative passion through the arts, it's also a point of great peril woven into the daily workings of life as an artist — that temptation toward conceit.
This isn't solely owned by artists, of course. Anyone who feels a strong call on their life to some direction can be tempted toward conceit.
But since my life lands in the arts I was particularly preoccupied with how conceit slips in on myself. Getting me to ponder such matters was a book by Os Guinness. In it (The Call) Guiness offers some fascinating insights: "The greatest artistic creators may be especially prone to this conceit. Creators, like God, they come to see themselves as challengers to God. D.H. Lawrence felt it himself: 'I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of the Almighty God to go through me — and it's rather an awful feeling. One has to be terribly religious, to be an artist.' Critic George Steiner glimpses it in the 'awesome encounters between God and the more god-like of his creatures. To have carved the figures in the Medici Chapel, to have imagined Hamlet and Falstaff, to have heard the Missa Solemnis out of deafness is to have said, in some mortal but irreducible manner: 'Let there be light.' It is to have wrestled with angels."
So the cartoon this week was a bit of a poke at my college days again where some of the conceit was fanned to full flame. There was almost a religious fervor wrapped in some of the conversations exchanged during those years. That atmosphere was too hard to resist poking a little fun at this week.
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