So there are many kinds of art, and many ways to live that encourage them to flourish and grow -- but they share an origin in lightness, what Pushkin (a poor rich man, but still a man who never had to cook his own meals or darn his own socks) refers to as "sacred laziness." The artist may be obsessed by an image or idea, but must be able to stare out the window or go for a stroll or waste hours and hours in the cafe, so that the work emerges in its own time, fully elaborated. Of course a lot of that is time-wasting, but a certain amount of levity is necessary. Think of the passions that are heavy: envy, jealousy, revenge. Salieri, at least in the myth (according to Pushkin).

In our culture, whatever I mean by that, it's difficult to think of scholarship in a light way: the images we have received are of heavy, dusty tomes from libraries, or tall tottering piles of paper or computer diskettes that threaten to spill out of order if the writer makes any sudden movement.
(A note by the way on computers: in my generation, we have often complained that our senior colleagues -- some of whom may have received tenure for finishing their dissertations, some of whom never finished their dissertations -- sat in judgment in tenure cases, requiring more of their junior colleagues than they themselves had ever produced: a book, a second book, and so on. But we shouldn't forget that they had to write that dissertation by hand, and pay a typist any time they wanted comments on a new draft: how much faster all the technology makes us! Our writing comes so much closer to the speed of our thinking; of course we can do more than they did -- I should say, than most of them did, since some were amazingly productive before computers were used for word processing.)

If it isn't any fun, if it's plodding and obligatory, then it does nothing to nourish us -- I'm thinking here not only of the Dissertation or the Article or the Tenure Book, but of the Lit Paper, the Honors Thesis, and so on.

So the ideal is to make your art and do your scholarship the way you have sex -- though of course that assumes that you're having good sex (which may add up to none at all: quality comes before quantity, of course). An interwoven fabric of joy, lightness, curiosity, invitation, response, freedom, and responsibility. Things work if we give them all of ourselves.

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