making sublime

Virginia Woolf on her ideal diary:

I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do.”

humans aren’t good at making things from scratch. our true genius, he thinks, lies in the art of taking something and evolving it, responding to it, combining it.