ness is always
mingled the shadowy apprehension that your powers may fail you when
next you wish to use them. Thus the joy of anticipatory creation is
akin to pain. It holds no such pure bliss as actual creation. When you
are in full swing, what you have just finished (unless you are
exhausted) seems to you nearly always the best piece of work that you
have ever done. For your critical, inhibitory apparatus is temporarily
paralyzed by the intoxication of the moment. What makes so many
artists fail at these times to enjoy a maximum of pleasure and a
minimum of its opposite, is that they do not train their bodies "like
a strong man to run a race," and make and keep them aboundingly vital.
The actual toil takes so much of their meager vitality that they have
too little left with which to enjoy the resulting achievement. If they
become ever so slightly intoxicated over the work, they have a
dreadful morning after, whose pain they read back into the joy
preceding. And then they groan out that all is vanity, and slander joy
by calling it a pottle of hay.

It takes so much vitality to enjoy achievement because achievement is
something finished. And you cannot enjoy what is finished in art, for
instance, without re-creating it for yourself. But, though re-creation
demands almost as much vital overplus as creation, the layman should
realize that he has, as a rule, far more of this overplus than the
pallid, nervous sort of artist. And he should accordingly discount the
other's lamentations over the vanity of human achievement.

The reason why Hazlitt took no pleasure in writing, and in having
written, his delicious essays is that he did not know how to take
proper care of his body. To be extremely antithetical, I, on the other
hand, take so much pleasure in writing and in having written these
essays of mine (which are no hundredth part as beautiful, witty, wise,
or brilliant as Hazlitt's), that the leaden showers of drudgery,
discouragement, and disillusionment which accompany and follow almost
every one of them, and the need of Spartan training for their sake,
hardly displace a drop from the bucket of joy that the work brings.
Training has meant so much vital overplus to me that I long ago
spurted and caught up with my pottle of joy. And, finding that it made
a cud of unimagined flavor and durability, I substituted for the
pottle a placard to this effect:

REMEMBER THE RACE!

This placard, hung always before me, is a remind