The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery

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

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.

in drawing as much as in boxing and dancing, that we miss the whole if we don’t attempt to grasp, in however limited and even feeble a form, what the real work feels like for other people as they do it. A sportswriter doesn’t have to be able to hit a baseball thrown by a Major League pitcher, but without some sense of what that act feels like—the h

As Swiss wrote the series of essays that were eventually collected in his book Shattering Illusions, he arrived at the idea that magic was, in his words, “an experiment in empathy”—a contest of minds, in which the magician dominates by a superior grasp of the way minds work. The spectator is not a dupe who gets fooled but a rational actor who gets

Erdnase color change

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

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.

being talented is also, obviously, a composite gift. It arrives each time in a unique formula of many parts, some obvious, some more mysterious.