fame
It is much better for a writer to be underrecognized than over, in terms of keeping one’s head down, like the proverbial Japanese nail, so that one might observe the world unhammered and unimpeded. Abjure fame and avoid obscurity. But between those extremes lies the perch where a writer occasionally might do some good work. There’s a Jack Butler Yeats painting I love, showing a wild celebration of St. John’s Eve in western Ireland, with Yeats and J. M. Synge standing in the background, watching and looking small and out of the picture. Yet it was they who created the picture, and a good deal more.
“Please Turn to the Chapter on Obscurity . . .,” New York Review of Books, May 23, 2014.
Don’t swap this raw sunshine for too much stage light.
Anna Cononi, Woody Guthrie’s granddaughter, www.woodyguthrie.org.
Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
“How Will You Measure Your Life?,” Harvard Business Review, July 1, 2010.