211

Achilles and Homer. One is always reminded of the difference between Achilles and Homer: one has the experience, the feeling; the other describes it. A real writer merely gives words to the emotion and experience of others. He is an artist to be able to guess a great deal from the little he has felt. Artists are by no means people of great passion, but they often pretend to be, in the unconscious feeling that others will believe more in the passion they depict if their own lives speak for their experience in this regard. One has only to let himself go, not control himself, give free rein to his anger and desires, and at once the whole world cries: "How passionate he is!" But that deep, raging passion that gnaws at and often swallows up the individual is something all its own. He who experiences it certainly does not describe it in dramas, music, or novels. Artists are often licentious individuals, insofar as they are not artists—-but that is something else.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Human, All Too Human
Section Four: From the Soul of Artists and Writers - Aphorism # 211

« Prev - Random - Next »