My dear Mr. Heifitz, My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed…. Beneath Shaw’s humorous words there is, as

we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.

In these notes I shall explore the hypothesis that limits are not only unavoidable in human life, they are also valuable.

Any genuine symbol, with its accompanying ceremonial rite, becomes the mirror that reflects insights, new possibilities, new wisdom, and other psychological and spiritual phenomena that we do not dare experience on our own. We cannot for two reasons. The first is our own anxiety: the new insights often—and, we could even say, typically—would

By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.

This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the world, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. What consolation was

There is another remark to be made about the conditions of this unconscious work: it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen except after some

The archaic period in ancient Greece was the time of emergence and vital growth fraught with distress that resulted from the chaos of expanding outer and inner limits. The Greeks were experiencing the anxiety of new possibilities—psychologically, politically, aesthetically, and spiritually. These new possibilities, and the anxiety that always

“the possibilities of the human being are unlimited.”