More Or Less Happy Experimenting

• “The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind ‘teased’ by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.”
  

​-Willa Cather, “Miss Jewett,” in Not Under Forty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), p. 80.

It's taken me only three months of Porte Saint Monty to establish a reasonably predictable cycle of iterations through a few themes. I offer the Willa Cather quote as both defense of this pattern and prediction that it will continue.

Cather calls the collection of essays from which the quote is pulled Not Under Forty to indicate that the themes she discusses will not appeal to people under the age of 40. Cather regards the generation after hers as fundamentally different, possessed of new biases and values. She writes that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” with a tone of resignation very similar to how I regard, oh, 2007 or thereabouts. Change was no longer a continuation; it was a schism of worldview.
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Possibly, regarding with queasy horror the generation under one’s own, is a universal manifestation of the human condition, triggered automatically by all who live to reach a certain age. Alternatively, Cather is simply saying that it’s difficult to say at 20 what the ghosts that haunt you at 40 are going to look like. Obsessions take time to form.