ElizabethGilbertonnurturingcreativity.docx

1、ElizabethGilbertonnurturingcreativityElizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses - and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person being a genius, all of us have a genius. Its a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.I am a writer. Writing

2、books is my profession but its more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I dont expect that thats ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my

3、whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called Eat, Pray, Love which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of

4、 which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like Im doomed. Seriously - doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, Arent you afraid - arent you afraid youre never going to be able to top that? Arent you afraid youre going to keep writing for your whole life and

5、youre never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?So thats reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that 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 wri

6、ter, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, Arent you afraid youre never going to have any success? Arent you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Arent you afraid that youre going to work your whole life at this craft and nothings ever goi

7、ng to come of it and youre going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure? (Laughter) Like that, you know.The answer - the short answer to all those questions is, Yes. Yes, Im afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And Im afraid of many m

8、any more things besides that people cant even guess at. Like seaweed, and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing the thing that Ive been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to b

9、e afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. You know, and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each others mental health in a way that other careers kind of dont do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical en

10、gineer and I dont recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? It didnt - that chemical engineering block John, hows it going? It just didnt come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group have

11、nt really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter)We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do

12、 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? And even the ones who didnt literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, las

13、t interview, he said Every one of my books has killed me a little more. An extraordinary statement to make about your lifes work, you know. But we dont even blink when we hear somebody say this because weve heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow weve completely internalized and accepted co

14、llectively 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 are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that - because you look

15、at it even from an inch away and, you know - Im not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think its odious. And I also think its dangerous, and I dont want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think its better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.And I definitely know that

16、, in my case - in my situation - it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that Im in right now in my career. Which is - you know, like check it out, Im pretty young, Im only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And its exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward