I'm back and I've decided to rename my blog Crooked Roads. For those of you who don't get the reference, it comes from my favorite of all poets living or dead, Mr. William Blake: "Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." I've always had an attachment to that line--taken directly from the Proverbs of Hell--but I've come to see its meaning in a new light. When I was younger, I used to take pride in staying off the beaten path, walking the proverbial crooked roads and seeing where they lead. I was confident, of course, that they would ultimately take me to the pinnacles of glorious success. Now that I've gotten older, I've come to see that if you truly want to pursue your own interior genius--your own artistic vision--you are going to HAVE to walk those crooked roads, those frustrating circuitous paths that may lead to great satisfaction and accomplishment--or may lead you nowhere. The awful and wonderful truth is that you just have to keep walking. Flaubert once defined talent as a long patience. This gives me the hope that if you have the patience to keep walking the crooked roads, they may still take you to places that the straight paths could never reveal.
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