therein lies what I think of now as the asymmetry of mastery: we overrate masters and underrate mastery.

In a recent summing-up essay in Antinomy, Swiss observed

Keyser Söze

If magic is just magicians doing card tricks to impress other magicians—I’m not interested in that anymore. I don’t want magic that looks real. What I want are real things that feel like magic.”

what really moves and stirs us is accomplishment, that moment of mastery when suddenly we feel that something profoundly difficult, tenaciously thorny, has given way, and we are now the Master of It, instead of us being mastered by it.

the greatest card manipulator of our own time, Steve Forte,

Arts large and small, major and minor, are always on a constantly turning wheel of invention. One generation’s “Such irony!” is the next generation’s “So obvious!” What makes a great magic trick is not skill alone, nor even performance alone, but skill and performance placed within a story that stays one neat step ahead of the audience’s expectatio

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.

We usually expand our capacities without changing our lives. People go off to meditation retreats and come back to their Manhattan existence; on the whole, they are not more serene, but they are much more knowing about where serenity might yet be found. People go to cooking school and don’t cook more; but they know how to cook.