Do you ever watch a film, or hear an album, or pace around a sculpture and are left with an irrepressible sense that you'll never create anything as meaningful, as beautiful, as poignant, as intelligent as that? That you'll never make someone you'll never meet cry, gasp, sigh, feel anything? That feeling that the piece left within you, that spark of imagination, that heat of emotion—you can't put your finger on it exactly, but you know that you do feel incredible, you do feel connected to the artwork like your heart to your brain. The mind of its creator is within yours for a moment. Soon you glide across the room on your toes, you flip the light switch delicately with one fingertip, you take a seat a little more gracefully, it is as though you are the actor, that you're writing the songs, that you're chipping the marble; maybe you don't realize it, maybe you can't even help it. But there is hope within you! You can create a thing that means something! Then... eventually, and always, you realize that in stepping back from that artwork you've just returned to your life, that you're just sitting down at your computer to check your feeds, to skim over someone else's news, to babble into a blog. Like a flood or dusk, the excitement fades, sinks and all you feel is an incandescent inefficacy, profoundly artistic sadness. Nothing you ever create will bring a stranger to tears or cause them to hold their breath or make them glide across the room on their toes...
Unless…