This is part of the promised follow-up to Integrity and Identity, Part I.
I have a confession to make: I want to be famous. Not just any kind of famous though, I want to be historical. Forget the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I want to be Bethoven. I have a childish dream that people will be remembering my words for centuries.
One of the big questions that we studied as English majors was, "Who gets included in the canon?" The canon being the list of works that every English major should know, the same as every American should know about George Washington, WWII, and Elvis.
All the time we were reading these authors and poets I was thinking, What made these writers the best? What made them worth reading 300 years later? I was taking notes, of course, on how I was going to emulate their success.
But Merton always knocks me back down to earth, as he says:
What is success? For some, being famous to their own generation is the ultimate success, but that won't necessarily make them historical. Van Gogh didn't sell any paintings, and William Blake lived like a pauper was one of the least read authors of his time. Now, both are considered to be some of the best of all time.Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint. For many absurd reasons, they are convinced that they are obliged to become somebody else who died two hundred years ago and who lived in circumstances utterly alien to their own (1949 p51).
Maybe their greatest success wasn't fame, but their relentless pursuit of their identity, of their own style, of their own way of looking at the world. As Blake's character in Jerusalem, Los says, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create."
What is success to you? Who are you trying to copy in order to get it? Do you know your greater purpose?
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