I found this musing on Socrates' old advice today... It's surprisingly hard to "know thyself."
From an article by Maria Popova at The Marginalian HERE :
“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be — a world which, in the sobering words of E.E. Cummings, “is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else.”
The article goes on to say:
"Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons."
As often, thanks to artist/writer Austin Kleon for bringing this to my attention!
(Following the chain of references starting from Kleon, through E. E. Cummings, led me eventually to this quote from Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney: “being true … to your own solitude, true to your own secret knowledge.”
What's been going on? Well, I've been crazy busy designing and drawing several shows and mentoring a talented group of early-career scenic designers. I don't feel free to post those designs yet (I like audiences to be surprised), but two of them are seemingly very simple, mostly screens to play on with light and images, but one is Sherlock Holmes' famous 221B Baker Street apartment, and another is the musical Matilda.
Links to earlier blog posts on Matilda HERE and HERE from when I visited NYC, saw the show on Broadway, and was lucky enough to hear its Tony-winning set designer, Rob Howell, talk about it.
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