In '
Talent', Annie Dillard gives an unconventional definition of talent. She describes talent as the inborn, God given gifts
in PRECOCIOUS
fields of music, mathematics and Chess. 'If you have such a gift, you know it by now.' She asserts. All the rest of us, in all other fields are not talented. We all start out dull and weary and uninspired.
She continues to assert that Genius is the product of education.According to Dillard, the Pasteurs and Cezannes and Melviles were neither more talented, nor more disciplined, nor energetic nor more driven than the rest of us. They were simply better educated. They all worked hard to study the works of other people in their fields. She describes doing something in life as hard, especially at the beginning when everything seems unmoving. Yet out of the likeness and equality, some still chose to die in peace, while others choose to turn themselves into physicists or thinkers or major league pitchers knowing perfectly that it will be nothing but hard work. She further encourages that all this may not be as hard at is sound since the action of doing something in itself creates discipline. Many at times, Dillard has been asked how she disciplines herself and the amount of time she put on her first prose book.
She explains the number of hours she put on her first prose book and how she later began getting excited over the idea of having a first book that she began putting even more time in her project. She equates the whole thing to lifting cars and even running marathons. 'They aren't ways of life but possibilities for everyone on certain occasions of life. You don't lift cars around the clock or write books every year.
But when you do , it is not so hard. You do it for love, for respect and for the world and for the respect of the task itself. Rising at night to feed a baby would be hard. But it certainly wouldn't be discipline. It would be something done grumblingly, for love and because it has to be done. Just like feeding a baby at night has to be done, so is it that something has to be done with one's life. Something specific and human. Lets not wait to be hit by love, or anything like that, Learn something first, then in the process of learning, you will get to love it. 'The line is endless.
I urge you to get in it, to get in line. It is a long line-but the only show in town.'