Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Thought for the Day: Lewis Hyde on The Begging Bowl Inside Us

An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that "begging bowl" to which the gift is drawn.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (NY: Random House, 1979), p. 186.