All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures. ~ Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
Anybody can write like somebody else, but it takes a long time to get to write like yourself... ~ Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on Life and Letters"
These propositions, quoted in Albert Murray's book The Blue Devils of Nada, "preclude imitation in favor of individuality", as Murray observes. Here I'm especially interested in Hemingway's statement that schools of art serve to classify their members as failures. What exactly does that mean?
My interpretation is that schools of art - and, I might add, schools of philosophy - set forth theoretical archetypes for what a person is to create or how a person is to live. Too often, the leaders - and sometimes especially the followers - within a school or movement judge others for falling short of the ideal, for building things not defined in the blueprint, for creating and living in ways that aren't according to plan.
Yet the artist, the thinker, the individual human being exists not to follow the rules or paint within the lines, but to experience life completely and then out of that experience to shape something meaningful.
To be clear, this fundamental personalism does not exclude the possibility and often the necessity of collaboration, interaction, and interdependence: writers work with editors and publishers, playwrights work with actors and directors, sculptors work with foundries and gallery owners, composers work with performers, and so on. But at their best all of these folks work together as creative individuals, not as interchangeable representatives or enforcers of some constraining ideology.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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