Hughes and Pearce

Hughes writes, “After the one percent of inspiration comes the 99 percent of perspiration” (70). This goes along with the “Aha!” factor. You have that single moment of inspiration and then you have to put in hours upon hours to make your project the way you want it. I’m not sure that I agree with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He said “no one can be ‘Creative with a capital C,’ unless they master all that went before them in the field of, like Freud of the flight-obsessed Wright brothers, create their own field” (70). Though this idea was only proposed I feel like he is ignoring all the genius’ that have forged their own ways in existing fields.

I have noticed a type of trend when this book talks about the creatives. They all die generally young. I know that life expectancy wasn’t all that long in the 1700 and 1800’s but even people like Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath died relatively young. I wonder why this is. Could it be because their minds have so much information and creativity in them that they cant hold any more? Or is it simply because the majority have mental illness’ and can’t take it anymore? Or is it their drug use that ages them, physically and mentally, so much that they just can’t go on? The scientists considered great by Hughes seem to live a lot longer than the artists.

I still disagree with the fact that creativity has to be socially acceptable. I mentioned in a much earlier blog that I thought it was wrong that a group of people have to agree that something is creative and worth looking at. On page 91, Hughes writes, “…most creatives find that the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself provide sufficient motivation”. They didn’t care if people liked it or if they got paid for it as long as they were satisfied with the outcome. If they were worried about being socially acceptable, the artists had to depend on the type of society that they lived in. If the society was strict and the artists idea was radical, they would have to wait to be accepted and probably wouldn’t even be recognized as a genius until after their deaths.