The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

We find meaning in one thing by enlarging the area of reference, making it not more precise but less, by a horizontal leap relating it to something larger. Meanings expand as our contexts expand. Art only becomes articulate within a history, each splashy “me” of Pollock’s pouring becoming a cool “you” of Warhol’s appropriation; and the more of the

Ella singing Gershwin matters because Ella knows when to make the words warble, and Ellis Larkins knows when to make the keyboard sigh. The art is the perfected imperfection.

Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, and author of the best basic explanatory tome on Darwinism, Why Evolution Is True

But, and this is a truth that must be said, over and over: suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, and so we cannot grade it on any kind of absolute scale. What we feel is what we feel, and though it may be true that we cry when we have no shoes until we meet a man with no feet, the larger truth is that having no shoes is our only way of beg

Sung words belong more fully to the world of ritual and routine, of incantation and mothers’ murmurings, than to the fully lucid and well-lit world of argument and dramatic advance. They work, or not.

By far the best account of Benny Leonard, both of his mystique and of his fighting style, I discovered, is by Budd Schulberg in one of his collections of boxing pieces. Schulberg, to my mind, may be the most underrated of all American authors, the author of the best firsthand account of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his novel The Disenchanted, and the in

More than we fear being evil, or even outrageous, what we fear most in life is being embarrassed. It is the great constraint, and the great propellant, of human accomplishment, and of its opposite, human destructiveness. Much of the worst of history is only comprehensible as a tale of embarrassment feared and, at huge lengths, avoided, or trying to

Dan Rocker’s hard-to-learn lesson—that no one really notices even eccentric behavior, that you can mostly follow your star, or your zipper, without raising the eyebrows or attention of the Others, who are following their own—was true here, as it is everywhere.

The self we keep inside is the needy monkey of Buddhist disdain. It becomes something more only in the rare moments when we dance in time with another self, looking at us. Meaning is the face of the Other. I see myself in my daughter’s eyes. The self becomes a soul only when it sees another self. Mastery, the dream of doing things well, is merely t