After their parade yesterday, some participants lined up in my windows. (Kirsten, I thought of the wonderful window toy-tableaux near where you used to live.) My windows look directly into my apartment, so I don't do this often.
I'd taken Neil Gaiman's View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction (2016) home from work, and last night I read his commencement speech, "Make Good Art". [Here, you can watch him on youtube, or read a written transcript.]
I laughed to recognize his advice to "behave as if"...
It's the same thing Thomas à Kempis suggested 700 years ago--advice I'd quoted just a week ago:
Anxious because you waffle in belief and fear you are doomed? Do what you would be doing if you did have certain hope.
Gaiman says to the college graduates--here, these are the final words of the his commencement speech:
"Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audiobook, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it.So, as instructed, here are bink (left) and me making mistakes + making believe = good art 😊
Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could do it.
She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.
"So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.
"And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art."
"Make believe"
Isn't that a funny phrase? Wouldn't it be "make belief"? But no, Etymology online says "make believe is from the late 14c.
Gosh, that when Thomas a Kempis was born--in 1380!
Ha, but I'm not alone:
according to the OED, "The noun form make-belief (1833) was 'Substituted by some writers for MAKE-BELIEVE; the formation of the latter, being misunderstood, was imagined to be incorrect'"
