What brought me to the book (for the second time) was reading the list of books a favored author of mine stated as being quite influential. Using the list, I knocked off Eliot's "Middlemarch" (loved that huge thought-filled tome), Stegner's "Angle of Repose", Dicken's "Bleak House" earlier in the year. I'd read "War and Peace" centuries ago (almost in a beer-bet, just to see if I could do it) and got very little out of it-and very little of it remains with me.
Anyhow, we get to a certain point in our lives and things just seem to be clearer, our understanding growing exponentially. This is true for me with my artworking as well. I'm facile, truly capable of "feeling" whether a work has merit ( not trying to be pretentious here, but feel as if my intuition and taste is genuinely sharp) and able to plunge more deeply into the work. Finally, I "understand" painting ( I'll leave anyone who is reading this to gauge just what that means on their own) -a claim which I could never make some years back.
So here's my question: are other people born with better understanding of these things so that they do not need to claw their way up the long ladder of understanding? I'm old at this point, yet here I am with vast new chapters opening up for me. It took me so long to get to this "learned" place-so is the point of life (uh-oh, time for all those not ready for this headiness to back off) to achieve this pinnacle and then croak? Seems damn unfair that now (I said this a moment ago) all these new pathways are opening up for me. Sure, I've heard that the journey is the thing, but after all these years I'm just knocking at the door and, painfully, I know of the huge possibilities beyond, yet I'm starting to stumble from exhaustion -a "life well-lived".
So is the point to just climb up (or not) from whatever intellectual level we are born with? Acknowledging that I'm standing on tall shoulders, isn't there some sort of boatman/Charon we can pay off so we can more quickly get to the meat of the matter and use our life's energy to go beyond the "mere mortals" span and be able to plunge into the riches behind the doors?
