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Articles

The Wood That Finds Itself A Violin

Yahia Lababidi contemplates the implacable calling to produce great works.

Throughout the cavernous corridors of literature echoes a distinctive call. A calling is still a calling by any other name. Even when divorced from the strictly religious sense, it embodies the ideal of service and requires renunciations and discipline, obedience and sacrifice.

Individual responses to this sense of the artistic life as a mission, a vocation, a life work, vary. Literature presents us with a dense tapestry of utterances made by artists submitting their lives in service of their artistic development.