"Every artist was first an amateur."
(Lucky numbers: 20, 11, 31, 47, 26, 8;
baseball in Chinese: "bang-qiu")
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I was too exhausted after today's long-ish work-day to cook, so my husband called Peking Cuisine for delivery. The crispy scallops with roasted honey-walnuts hit the spot.
The fortune cookie fortune was uncanny and brought to mind a recurring question in my mind: when is a writer a "real" writer or a musician a "real" musician? Can one be an artist by virtue of how one views the world, and the inner disposition with which one lives life - what Flannery O'Connor called "the habit of being"- or, does the nature of the work produced (good/bad, published/unpublished, finished/unfinished) figure into the definition too? (This is sounding vaguely like the justification-by-faith versus value-of-good-works dialogue among Christian churches...interesting...)
A wonderful fortune, and thought provoking in that chicken-and-egg sort of way. I tend toward the inner disposition defining the artist, and you become a musician the moment you start trying to express yourself through music. There is no magic threshold, and there are no guards at the gate.
ReplyDeleteHi, gottagopractice - Thanks for visiting, and for your lovely comment. Nice to know of other musician-docs out there!
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