Be True To The Dreams of Thy Youth
Dear friends,
While wrestling with a week dogged by bureaucracy and paperwork, I decided enough was enough and trudged down one evening to my creative space at Mahalla.
On the way, I read what Melville inscribed on his desk late in life:
“Be true to the dreams of thy youth.” — Friedrich Schiller
It was his reminder after Moby Dick sold fewer than 3,000 copies in his lifetime. The follow-up, Pierre, was panned by critics and obliterated his reputation.
As the drab post-war buildings flashed by outside the S-Bahn, I mulled over the paradox of dream.
The prevailing advice is to give things a shot in your youth, throw fire at them, and see if they stick. If they don’t, then at least you’ve got your failures out of the way by 30, and you can get on with the business of taking responsibility for yourself and your life.
And yet, here’s the thing:
Taking responsibility also means being able to live with yourself.
But more than that:
The game only begins when you get to 30.
It’s out of the failures that you start accruing information.
Ah, ok, that works, but hell, I’m never doing it like that again.
So, just as you get the value that only a few failures can teach you, you’re taught to put the game aside. Just as you’ve learnt the first rules!
Melville started writing Moby Dick at 31.
His was the inverted experience: success as a young man with “Typee” and “Omoo” which cememented his reputation as a writer of exotic adventure stories.
But his journey was just beginning.
His best work lay ahead, critical perception be damned.
As his work reached his maturity, his career careered southwards.
It was never again easy for him.
As one novel after another was panned, he was left in dire financial straits. Eventually, he took a job as a customs inspector in New York. It provided financial stability, and, as if to offset the tedium of everyday life —and presumably the lack of time it afforded— he turned to poetry.
Who can know what it does to the spirit to make a work as great as Moby Dick and see it not only panned but hardly read in your lifetime?
Melville dealt with impossible failures.
Yet, despite it all, he stayed true to the dreams of his youth.
One way or another, it is our challenge to keep ourselves not just physically alive but spiritually too.
It may not be the same dream as your youth, but what is your dream?
If you are not sure, then is that not worth taking a look at?
And if you know immediately but have a turn in your stomach, is it not worth checking in with?
Because who the dam hell defines what you can do today?
Or even more importantly, who you can be.
We moderns are obsessed with this fanciful notion of success or failure.
It will always be defined by society on the outside through metrics.
I define it like this:
Can I live with myself?
Too often, the thing we most ignore is the one thing we most want to do.
The effect of endless paper shuffling, the infinite invention of the bureaucrat, and the unending capacity of the world's administrators to trap the human spirit in a straight jacket is to build dull layers between what you feel and what you think.
And the duller it becomes, the more it settles in.
Like scar tissue.
It may not be popular, but here’s what I think:
Keep the fucking wound open.
Feel it.
Anything is better than a spirit that’s warped into cynical submission.
As I exited the train, I thought of Melville, rewriting phrases in his mind as he went about his daily business as a customs officer.
I wrote Moby Dick, you git.
I got to my studio.
It was late and dark, and Mahalla was 10,000 square metres silent.
I took my guitar into its centre.
Howled into the emptiness.
Caught a melody.
A song formed.
I titled it:
The Bureaucrat.
And cackled into the void.
It was a good one.
I will record it.
God knows what will happen with these songs, slowly forming out of the dark.
Maybe no one will hear them.
But my spirit is alive.
For better or worse, I am doing what I set out to do.
Melville had reminded me:
Be True To The Dreams of Thy Youth
I was ready again to get back to the bidding of the world.
And that was okay.
Because tonight, I had negotiated with it on my terms.
Have a great day, everyone, and see you next week,
Love,
Jim
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