And again, from Chapter 78:
“Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.”
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It is so remarkable, in fact, that the Chinese sage Lao Tzu invoked water in his description of the Tao, which can mean Path or Way. The following is from Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching:
“The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.”
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Of course, it is the molecular composition of water, and its condition as a liquid, that causes water to behave the way it does. But that doesn’t make the behavior itself any less remarkable.
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Or is all of it different, even though a person can’t determine, just by observing it, how, or where, or in what way it is different?
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That couldn’t be right, but if it isn’t, then how much of the water is different, from one wave to the next, and how much of it is the same?
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And is that water from the second wave the same water that comes in with the third wave?
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Is the water from the first wave the same water that comes in with the second wave?
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And as you stand there looking out, the surf rushes up over your feet, swirls around them, then slips back out to do the same thing again.
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You open your eyes, and get yourself up, and walk on down to the water.
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Or maybe the sun is shining, your eyes are closed, you’re lying on your back in the sand at the beach.
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Maybe you’re in a bar, and outside it is raining.
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Although, if you’re hearing it for the first time, you might not know who the voice belongs to.
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By “originality” I mean this: you know the voice of Billie Holiday when you hear it.
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T.S. Eliot describes this relationship, between artists and their predecessors, in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. So does Harold Bloom, in his book The Anxiety of Influence.
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Of course, artists do not work out of a vacuum, but within a tradition that, depending on the genre, might be traced back as far as prehistoric man. Thus, even their originality owes something of itself to the work of those who have preceded them in time, and whose influence can be seen in what they produce.
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Another way of saying this is that art is less about self-expression, and more about invention. Which is why it can be said that the work of any true artist is in some way original. Each artist invents a style by which to give expression to reality.
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Which itself is an example, I think, of how the artistic ‘gene’ can develop in any given artist. Rarely does an artist become one merely because they wish to express themselves (though that might be an element of their aesthetic) but more so because they fall in love with what other artists have already made, and wish to follow in a similar, though not identical, mode of creativity.
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For example, in the opening of her novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen writes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” And while there is nothing all that remarkable about the vocabulary or syntax of that sentence, there is something so striking about its humor and its insight, and the economy with which that insight is delivered, that a reader of a certain age and personality, and perhaps even gender, will get no further than it, before closing the book, not because this reader doesn’t understand what he has read, but because he is almost distracted by his wonderment for the person who wrote it.
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And I felt even then, I think, some curiosity or affinity that I knew had the potential to deepen, though I was also aware, whenever I opened those books, of a vague dissatisfaction that arose from the knowledge they would stir in me of my own youthfulness, so that I would close them after a page or two, sensing that I’d return to them when I was older — not very much older, just whenever I no longer thought of myself as such a child. For all great novels, all works of art, communicate, even in their most mundane details, a refinement or intelligence that adolescents understand, but to which some can react, as I did, with a restlessness that is felt in the emotions, as if a maturity equal to that of the author is what is wanted, before one can meet the author in the arena of his or her virtuosity.
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On that shelf were other well-known books, by authors whose names I’d already begun to hear of, in school or on TV, or through some other form of media, or in a passing remark made by someone older, whose conversation I happened to be overhearing.