Instead, we are drawn to activities in which we find joy. We can’t always explain why, but some activities seem to contain ingredients that breathe life into us, that lift us up out of ourselves to reveal something finer, more resilient, and more creative. Each of us is different, of course, so each of us finds this joy in different activities, yet each of us knows this feeling. And when our work does indeed bring us this joyful ingredient, when we do indeed feel love, even, for what we do, then we are truly magnificent.

Our present theory is that devotion to a task at hand puts us in harmony with our creative source. We dedicate ourselves to work itself, not to a false personality.

The highest kind of writing — which must not be confused with the most ambitious kind — belongs to the realm of grace. Talent is part of it, certainly; a thorough understanding of the secret laws, absolutely. But finding the subject and theme which is in perfect harmony with your deepest nature, your forgotten selves, your hidden dreams, and the full unresonated essence of your life — now that cannot be reached through searching, nor can it be stumbled upon through ambition. That sort of serendipity comes upon you on a lucky day. It may emerge even out of misfortune or defeat. You may happen upon it without realising that this is the work through which your whole life will sing. We should always be ready. We should always be humble. Creativity should always be a form of prayer.

The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one’s place in the world — a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self-becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

In the struggle to extend our song, we are all of us extending and participating in the ever unfolding story of humanity and literary tradition — but extending it, I hope, not only on to musty shelves where well-meaning scholars make smaller the worlds within words, but extending it, I pray, into the raw world, into the dreams of the living, into their struggles, their suffering, their joys.