Searching for inspiration

It's said that the only things sure in life are death and taxes. Not having experienced the afterlife or the IRS, I can't yet attest to this statement's truth.

Instead, I believe in a different pessimistic eventuality: When I have most need of a brilliant idea is when my mind remains most blank. In other words, the harder I search for inspiration, the farther it flees.

It's no wonder that the Greeks so often invoked the Muses. Goddesses of music, poetry and the arts, the nine sisters were the deification of creativity, the pagan artist's patron saints. Creation is a divine act, as the book of Genesis demonstrates, and one that humans can only begin to approach. For centuries, an artist's virtuosity was attributed to divine inspiration. Only during the Renaissance did an artist's creative power come to be celebrated as a manifestation of individual genius. Writer on art Giorgio Vasari spoke of the "Divine Michelangelo," while "The Divine Comedy" became the accepted name for Dante's great work. This shift in attitude separated inspiration from divinity and linked it instead to human creative power. Inspiration still retains some of its aura of the divine, mainly through its refusal to be commanded.

My search for inspiration bears no comparison to the artist's. Mostly I'm just a student racing against an impossible deadline. It's this pressure to produce that paradoxically bars me from productivity. A rabbi once told me that the "two hours" she took to write a sermon never included the week she spent thinking before sitting down to string thoughts together. Without sufficient subconscious ferment, however, the two hours could stretch to 20.

Inspiration, then, becomes the sudden crystallization of a group of previously unrelated ideas. The unification's novelty lies in its juxtaposition of thoughts that ordinarily occupy separate, even mutually exclusive, spheres. The split-second burst of illumination that results from the sudden alignment of the spheres must then be pursued at all costs. If chaos is allowed to do its work, the array returns to disorder and you're left holding the pieces that won't join again, try as you might. Inspiration gone before it can be grasped leaves you mourning the loss of what you might have found, had you followed it through the rabbit hole and into Wonderland.

Inspiration's timing is as good as a six-year-old is tactful. Just as it won't come when commanded, inspiration strikes at the least opportune moment — in the middle of class or of a conversation, while you're crossing the street or trying to fall asleep. At these moments of pure serendipity, an accident of being in the right place at the right time, of hearing the right thing with the right ear, results in something entirely new. To appreciate the flash of brilliance requires a certain perceptiveness. To see magic requires that your eyes be open.

And as inspiration with good ideas, many of the best things in life just happen to us. A person with whom we first pass words while waiting in line becomes, with further acquaintance, a close friend. A turn taken wrong while traveling leads us to a rose garden hidden at the end of a narrow alleyway. Impatience and lack of time make us demand moments now, but unable to gather them up when they do blossom. Understanding comes when the mind is calm; goddesses appear when entreated softly. We can't choose when things will happen to us, but we can choose whether or not to recognize and appreciate them. Sometimes a pause is all that's needed to put frustration to flight.

That said, why does it require an act of God to write a paper?