Image-courtesy Kansas' "Leftoverture" album coverFutility plagues a man’s life more than anything else:
“My life is of little consequence. My best efforts are in vain. I will be an obscure footnote in History's appendix. I long for significance, but suspect my efforts are a pebble's drop into a dark, hollow well. My life will be a long testimony to failure.”
It is the lament of the writer of Ecclesiastes:
"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher...There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow." - Eccl. 1:1, 11
We’ve come to expect that breakthrough comes soon and comes at a younger age. We’ve looked to the exceptions to give us our timeline: Citizen Kane, Orson Well’s masterpiece was written at age twenty-five. Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 was composed when he was twenty-one. Many of Picasso’s most celebrated paintings were done in his twenties. [What the Dog Saw, Malcom Gladwell]
However, as David Galenson, who has studied our assumptions about creativity points out, there are many other cases in which genius peaked much later: Robert Frost wrote 42 percent of his anthologized poems after turning fifty. Alfred Hitchcock directed his films, “Rear Window,” “Psycho” and “Virtigo” between the ages of fifty-four and sixty-one. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was published when he was forty-nine, and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe at fifty-eight. The master painter, Cezanne’s, finest work was done in his senior years. [What the Dog Saw, Malcom Gladwell]
Malcom Gladwell calls those who peak later in life, “late bloomers.” [What the Dog Saw] For me, it offers an antidote to a man’s fear that his life won't amount to much: breakthrough is a slow bang. It is a long fuse that culminates in vivid splendor only after it has burned that slow, steady, coil upon tedious coil of fuse.
But note: the fuse still gives off spark and light at each moment leading up to the bang.