"If we let ourselves we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come."
~C.S. Lewis, "Learning in War Time", The Weight of Glory
AND THIS ONE
AND THIS ONE
''Dorothy Sayer's excellent essay, Toward a Christian Esthetic, published in Letters to a Diminished Church, Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine. In this wonderful essay, which deserves several blogs posts of its own Sayers explains the marks of a true poet or artist:
"A poet is a man who not only suffers the impact of external events but also experiences them (You only experience a thing when you can express it--however haltingly--to your own mind--also Sayers) He puts the experience into words in his own mind, and in so doing recognizes the experience for what it is. To the extent that we can do that, we are all poets. A poet so-called is simply a man like ourselves with an exceptional power of revealing his experience by expressing it, so that not only he, but we ourselves, recognize that experience as our own."
About the recognition of truth that we get from the artist's work she writes:
"I mean the recognition of truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves withing our grasp. It is a new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet/artist has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it."
