Thursday, August 5, 2010

Happy Birthday, Mr. Berry

"There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say 'It is yet more difficult than you thought.' This is the muse of form.
[...]
It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings" (96, 97).

- Wendell Berry, "Poetry in Marriage," Standing By Words

2 comments:

Nick McCollum said...

Ahh, so painfully true. I feel like I'm waiting on something in me to break free so that I can really live, or something like that. Maybe that's the Muse of Inspiration. But maybe too I'm missing some beautiful music right now.

Elizabeth Dark Wiley said...

bring on the baffling, right?