The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

Blaine still works intently on card tricks, of the more avant-garde kind that derive from the great Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, whom all magicians today, on all sides, uncritically revere.

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

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 we call genius is most often inspired idiosyncrasy, and sometimes even inspired idiocy. Bob Dylan started off as a bad musician, and then spent 10,000 hours practicing. But he did not become a better musician. He became Bob Dylan.

Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge. The “flow” in which, if we’re lucky, our daily work is situated, is a narrow current within a broad river that we ceased navigating adventurously long ago, having capsized too many times to try again.

We make ourselves in our father’s sunlight but also in his shadow: what he beams down we bend away from.

Not only does sourdough starter live forever, yeast begetting yeast begetting yeast, like one of those chains of generation in the Bible—but the traces of DNA from bakers’ hands long gone remain fertile within the starter. The schmutz is still present generations later. It is the traces that doubtless make the flavor.

Erdnase color change

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.