[Music] [Applause] I am a writer; writing books is my profession, but it's more than that of

course; it is also my great lifelong love and fascination, and I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But that

said, um, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to

sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And um, the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote

this book, this memoir called *Eat, Pray, Love*, um, which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, um, went out in the world

for some reason and became this big mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I

go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Um, seriously doomed—doomed! Like they come up to me now, all worried,

and they say, "Aren't you afraid? Um, aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Um, aren't you afraid you're

going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world

cares about at all, ever again?" So that's reassuring, you know. Um, but it would be worse except for that I

I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people, when I was a teenager, that I

wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you

afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you?

Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it, and

you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of

Failure like that, you know, and um, the answer—short answer—to all those questions is yes. Um, yes, I'm afraid of

all those things, and I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that, you know. People can't even

guess at, like, um, seaweed and other things that are scary. But when it comes to writing, um, the thing that I've

been sort of thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why, you know, is it rational? Is it logical that um

anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do, you know? Um, and what

is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health

in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Um, like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer, and um, I

don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical

engineer, you know? It just didn't come up like, "Get chemical engineering block, John. You know, how's it going?" And um, it it

just didn't come up like that, you know. But to be fair, right, um, chemical engineers as a group, you know, haven't

really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives, um, and we writers, you know,

we kind of do have that reputation. And not just writers, but creative people across all genres seem to have this

reputation for being enormously mentally unstable, um, and, you know, all you have to do is look at the very grim death count

in the 20th century alone of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you

know. Um, and even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Um,

Norman Mailer, just before he died, in his last interview, he said, 'Every one of my books has killed me a little.'

A more extraordinary statement to make about your life's work, you know? But we don't even blink when we hear somebody

say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long, and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted

collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked, and that artistry, in the end, will

always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is, um, are you guys

all cool with that idea? Like, are you comfortable with that? Because, um, you look at it even from an inch away, and

you know, I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious, and I also think it's dangerous, and I don't

want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage, you know, our great creative minds to

live, you know, um, and uh, and I, I definitely know that in, in my case, in my situation, um, it would be very dangerous

for me to start sort of leaning down that dark path of assumption, you know, particularly given the circumstance that

I'm in right now in my career, which is, you know, like, check it out: I'm pretty young. I'm only about 40 years old. I

still have maybe another four decades of work left in me, and it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this

point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book,

right? Um, I, I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now: it's exceedingly likely that my

greatest success is behind me, you know? Um, so Jesus, what a thought! You know, like that's the kind of thought that could

lead a person to start drinking gin at 9:00 in the morning, and you know I don't

want to go there. You know, I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love, and so the question becomes how, you know,

and so it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now in order to continue writing

is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have

a safe distance, you know, between me as I am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing

is going to be from now on. And as I've been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that, I've been

sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find like other societies to see if they might have had better and

saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. Um, so stay with me because it does circle

around back, but um, ancient Greece and ancient Rome, people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human

beings back then. Okay? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable

source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity daemons. Socrates famously believed that

he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied

creative spirit a genius. Um, which is great because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a

particularly clever individual; they believed that a genius was this sort of magical, divine entity um who was

believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, um, and who would come out

and sort of invisibly assist the artists with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant, there

it is right there, that distance that I'm talking about, that psychological construct to protect you from the

results of your work, you know, um, and everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist

was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism. Right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take

all the credit for it; everybody knew you had this like disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not

entirely your fault, you know, um. Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame, and, uh, this is how people thought about

creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big

idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe, right? Above all gods and

mysteries, and there's no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the Divine. And it's

the beginning of rational humanism, and, um, people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self

of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as

being a genius, rather than having a genius. And I've got to tell you, I think that was a huge error, you know? I, I think

that allowing somebody, like one mere person, to believe that he or she is like the vessel, you know, like the font and

the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much.

responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche; it's like asking somebody to swallow the sun, you know, it just

completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance, and I

think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And um, if this is true, and I I

think it is true, the question becomes, you know, what now? You know, can we do this differently? Uh, maybe go back to

some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Um, maybe not, you know, like, um, maybe we can't just erase 500

years of rational humanistic thought in one 18-minute speech. Um, and there's probably people in this audience

who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around, like rubbing fairy juice on their

projects and stuff. Like, I I'm not probably going to bring you all along with me on this, um, but the the question

that I kind of want to pose is, you know, why not? Um, why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as

anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process; a

process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something—which is to say, as basically everyone here knows—does

not always behave rationally and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal. Um, I had this encounter recently where I

met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life, and she told

me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would like

feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape, and she said it was like a thunderous train of air, and it

would come barreling down at her over the landscape and when she felt it coming, because it would like shake the

Earth under her feet, she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point and that was to, in her words, run like

hell, and she would like run like hell to the house. And she'd be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that

she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect

it and um, and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be like running and running and

running, and then she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would like barrel through her and she would miss it and

she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it, for another poet and um, and then there were

these times—this is the piece I never forgot—she said that there were moments when she would almost miss it. Right, so she's

like running into the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a

pencil just as it's going through her. And then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she

would catch it; she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was

Your elusive creative genius - Elizabeth Gilbert

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Your elusive creative genius - Elizabeth Gilbert

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