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For Everything There is a Season
You may have heard that somewhere. Turn, turn
There are seasons in which an artist strives to produce his own work. But there are other seasons — very sacred ones — in which his muse hibernates, that he may remember all the gifted elders who inspired his youth and gave his life its direction.
Actors, actresses, writers, singers, dancers and musicians. Saints and philosophers. Sculptors and painters. Architects and stonemasons. If he had lacked exposure to their influence, his subsequent existence would have been so different from what it was that he cannot even imagine what it might have looked like.
He has always taken it for granted — that rich cultural environment that showed him what adult life was supposed to contain.
Growing up, it never occurred to him that other childhoods might not include the same things — even though his favorite authors wrote about such childhoods! The fact that they were the subjects of novels and movies served to keep them in the literary realm. Culture by association, you might say.
Intellectually, he knew the stories depicted ignorance and want. But they were being depicted through scholarship and skill. So even their crushing hopelessness was somehow transformed into something more ethereal.
