'You do it for love. You do it for love and respect for your own life; you do it for love and respect for the world; and you do it for love and respect for the task itself.'

Talent | By Annie Dillard

A marvelous text that I loved reading and re-reading over and over again! It’s titled, ‘Talent’ and it’s written by Professor Annie Dillard. Thanks much to a vibrant research scholar and our alumna Ms. Pheba Paul for sharing this essay on 'Talent' with us. So here we go!

Talent

By Annie Dillard

There is no such thing as talent. If there are any inborn, God-give gifts, they are in the precocious fields of music, mathematics, and chess; if you have such a gift, you know it by now. All the rest of us, in all the other fields, are not talented. We all start out dull and weary and uninspired. Apart from a few like Mozart, there never have been any great and accomplished little children in the world. Genius is the product of education.

Perhaps it’s a cruel thing to insist that there is no such thing as talent. We all want to believe—at least I do—that being selfless was “easy” for Albert Schweitzer, that Faulkner’s novel just popped into his head, that Rembrandt painted because he “had to.” We want to believe all these nonsensical things in order to get ourselves off the hook. For if these people had no talent, then might the rest of us have painting or writing or great thinking as an option? We, who have no talent? I think the answer is yes, absolutely.

So I maintain that the people who have made something of their lives—the Pasteurs and Cezannes and Melvilles—were neither more talented no more disciplined nor more energetic nor more driven than the rest of us. They were simply better educated. Some of them did it the hard way, studying all the difficult works of their fields at home on their own. Others studied in school. But they all studied. You won’t find a writer who hasn’t studied the details of the works of other writers—although occasionally you find an American writer like Hemingway or Whitman who deliberately pretended to be spontaneous and unstudied, probably in order to mislead the competition. And occasionally you find a writer like Thoreau, a very well educated Harvard man whose reading was in the Greek classics and in whose work most readers overlook the evidences of scholarship and effort simply because they don’t want to see them.

It’s hard work, doing something with your life. The very thought of hard work makes me queasy. I’d rather die in peace. Here we are, all equal and alike and none of us much to write home about—and some people choose to make themselves into physicists or thinkers or major-league pitchers, knowing perfectly well that it will be nothing but had work. But I want to tell you that it’s not as bad as it sound. Doing something does not require discipline; it creates its own discipline.

People often ask me if I discipline myself to write, if I work a certain number of hours a day on a schedule. They ask this question with envy in their voices and awe on their faces and sense of alienation all over them, as if they were addressing an armored tank or a talking giraffe or Niagara Falls. We all want to believe that other people are natural wonders; it gets us off the hook.

Now, it happens that when I wrote my first book of prose, I worked an hour or two a day for a while, and then in the last two months, I got excited and worked very hard, for many hours a day. People can lift cars when they want to. People can recite the Koran, too, and run in marathons. These things aren’t ways of life; they are merely possibilities for everyone on certain occasions of life. You don’t life cars around the clock or write books every year. But when you do, it’s not so hard. It’s not superhuman. It’s very human. You do it for love. You do it for love and respect for your own life; you do it for love and respect for the world; and you do it for love and respect for the task itself.

If I had a little baby, it would be hard for me to rise up and feed that little baby in the middle of the night. It would be hard; but it certainly wouldn’t be a discipline. It wouldn’t be a regimen I imposed on myself out of masochism, nor would it be the flowering of some extraordinary internal impulse. I would do it, grumbling, for love and because it has to be done.

Of course it has to be done. And something has to be done with your life too: something specific, something human. But don’t wait around to be hit by love. Don’t wait for anything. Learn something first. Then while you are getting to know it, you will get to love it, and that love will direct you in what to do. So many times when I was in college I used to say of a course like Seventeenth Century Poetry or European History, “I didn’t like it at first, but now I like it.” All of life is like that—a sort of dreary course which gradually gets interesting if you work at it.

I used to live in perpetual dread that I would one day read all the books that I would ever be interested in and have nothing more to read. I always figured that when that time came I would force myself to learn wildflowers, just to keep awake. I dreaded it, because I was not very interested in wildflowers but thought that I should be. But things kept cropping up and one book has led to another and I haven’t had to learn wildflowers yet. I don’t think there’s much danger of coming to the end of the line. The line is endless, I urge you to get in it, to get in line. It’s a long time—but it’s the only show in town.

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