mouseworks

I think one of the reasons I gave up the camera was that I was seeing and remembering far too many people who were going to write or who were writing after the kids left home, after they retired, or any number of combinations of things. Most of them don't succeed at even greater percentages than those who don't succeed who started at earlier ages. The premise makes an assumption that their life experiences will translate into something useful for the art, but most people like my father who try writing after retirement don't have the reading or understanding gained in other ways that would give their experiences a context.

Also, the arts seem to be different from other sorts of learning -- they're more like a series of habits, a growth that's informed by thinking analytically about the art, but which isn't really completely under analytical control. The progress is more developing practices than thinking about something and setting out to do it the way one would put together a bicycle. I can put together a bicycle from a book, but I can't simply read a lot and put together a novel.

The people who are the most successful at any of the arts started young, worked in cities with other people doing the arts, and generally didn't have spectacular difficulties getting some recognition, often no difficulty getting recognition (W.H. Auden's comments that few people get less recognition than they deserve; many get more recognition than they deserve come to mind here. Reasonable people tend to know where they rank and people who find their artistic abilities aren't up to their ambitions often move on to other things.

For an academic to encourage an older beginner as if there was significant chance of that person being able to catch up to artists who've been at it since childhood feels like to me more a matter of manipulation, of getting attention by praising others, than making a useful statement.

I think the academics excuse themselves by believing that art at any age is enlightening to the artist, but often these older students have different ambitions than simple enlightenment. They want to make money at it or get recognition. The famous examples of people who started late tend to be somewhat mythical -- Grandma Moses had been an embroiderer before turning to art because working with needles hurt her hands. Her father had encouraged her art when she was a child. While she didn't have formal training, she had worked on art as a child and painted as a young adult.

But most of the time, people starting serious work in retirement not only have lost time in developing their art, but have less agile minds than they had in their 30s and 40s.

I didn't digest the amounts of things I'd need to do photography even as well as my writing, and while I'm not sure about my writing being what I'd like it to be, I do have what I have.

The dream of taking up something new in retirement seems to be what keeps people working at jobs they may not care for which allow them to save for the day when they can finally do what they want to do. And there are an enormous number of adult education classes that will take their money while encouraging them.

Try hard while young and let the chips fall where they may. If the arts aren't the answer, then move on, without the fantasy that one can come back in retirement and write the Great American Novel.

The fantasies are how camera stores sell people like me $10,000 worth of camera gear and how many programs that admit older adults fill their classes.

I needed the cash more than the fantasy.