It’s the advice that William Carlos Williams wrote to his son in college:
You, dear Bill, have a magnificent opportunity to enjoy life ahead of you. You have sensibility (even if it drives you nuts at times), which will be the source of keen pleasures later and the source of useful accomplishments too. You’ve got a brain, as you have been told ad nauseam. But these are the very things which are tormenting you, the very things which are your most valued possessions and which will be your joy tomorrow. . . . Wait it out. Don’t worry too much. You’ve got time. You’re all right. You’re reacting to life in the only way an intelligent, sensitive young man in a college can. In another year you’ll enter another sphere of existence, the practical one. The knowledge, abstract now, which seems unrelated to sense to you (at times) will get a different color.
Sooner or later we all of us knock our heads against the ceiling of the world. It’s like breaking a record: the last fifth of a second, which marks the difference between a good runner and a world beater is the hardest part of the whole proceeding. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 262.)
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For a brief biography of William Carlos Williams, click here.
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