[T]he essentially human characteristic of general intellectual curiosity interests itself in the demonstration of previously unremarked interconnecti… - John Barth

As instanced by Virgil and Dante, the vocation of artisthood bears some analogy to those of mythic-herohood and messiahship—conspicuously so for the Romantics and the great early Modernists, with their characteristic conception of the artist as hero (one recalls James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, originally named Stephen Hero, vowing to "forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race"), more modestly so even for Postmoderns. In at least some cases, the present author's included, one's apprentice sense of calling may be far from clear. even to oneself. […] One may be uncertain of both one's vocation and one's talent for it, or confident of one of those but not the other, or confident of both but mistaken, or doubtful of both but mistaken, or correct on one or both counts. In the happiest case, one comes to have reasonable faith in both calling and gift and at least some "objective" confirmation that that faith is not altogether misplaced. But "real, non-scripted life" is slippery terrain, in which templates and prophecies are ill-defined, elastic, arguable, and verdicts are forever subject to reversal. One crosses one's fingers, invokes one's muse and does one's best.

One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.

[A]rtistic Meisterstücken [masterpieces], even less-than-Meisterstücken, have always been points of departure for "solitary meditation and contemplation," to a degree depending, I suppose, on the particular Meisterstück, the particular reader, viewer, or auditor, and the particular circumstances of their encounter.