It's about time...

Instead of our usual Fun Friday Resources, allow me to offer a meditation on time.

On Wednesday afternoon, Twitter blocked all its verified “blue check” accounts for three hours in an effort to lock down the security breach involving those accounts and a Bitcoin scam. (Nobodies, like yours truly, were unaffected.) When they were allowed back in, hilarity ensued.

Benjamin Dreyer, author of Dreyer’s English, droll as always, returned with this gem:

…referencing of course the recently popular factoid that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine during the plague. The rest of us are supposed to be using our enforced isolation to achieve similar feats.

Well.

I’ve been puttering about with this metal lizard decoration from the labyrinth, and as projects go it’s very low-key. I mean, if I never do anything else to it, it will be fine, but my plan is to decorate it with fairly intricate patterns.

At every step of the way, though, I find I have to postpone/wait before proceeding: yesterday, having decided that I needed a darker blue and a yellow-green in the palette, I went to Michael’s to see if they had the Testor’s enamel in those colors. They did not; the rack is largely empty and uncared-for. I had to order online, and it will be another two weeks before the paint I need will be in my hands.

I was frustrated, naturally, but it got me to thinking: What’s the rush?

It’s not just that a) the project is unimportant; and b) I’m in Captivity for the foreseeable future. The important realization is that all art takes time. We are wrong if we think it’s supposed to flow from us without stopping into one perfect result.

Yes, Mozart could do that, but he’s dead.

Consider:

• J.R.R. Tolkien took thirteen years to write The Lord of the Rings.

• Beethoven took nine years to compose his Symphony No. 9, “Choral.”

• Lin-Manuel Miranda took six years to write Hamilton.

• Michelangelo took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

• I took 5 years to write William Blake’s Inn. (And that was 20 years after I first started on it.)

Except for Michelangelo — the Sistine Chapel was a pretty big project, after all — the rest of us spent that time creating crap, fixing the crap, setting the crap aside, coming back to the crap, and creating new crap. MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT can be, and usually is, a very slow process.

So even though we may be looking at another year in Captivity, there’s no reason for you (or me) to fret about not being able to produce new works of art within that time. If it takes time, it takes time. Cras Melior Est.

Of course, if you’re Mozart or Shakespeare, hop to it.