Brice (and Design History class),

I am writing this to you but decided to share some of these thoughts as well with your classmates, as I’m sure they are finding themselves with a lot on their plate, not so unlike yourself.

My counsel to you and your class is this: When you have things that must be accomplished try to remember that for good to become great, it is about challenging yourself and persevering. You really can’t go through life, or any moment even, thinking about quitting just because tasks seem so large, or time too short. Reasoning ‘job’s too enormous’ or ‘too little time’ is merely an odd euphamism for ‘I don’t care’… after all, consider that as difficult as everything might seem, and yes you will have to dig and work harder, even give up something you possibly wanted to do- if you’re going to achieve anything, you’ve got to stick with something and be committed. To succeed in this world you’ll have to look for the circumstances you want, and, if you can’t find them- go make them yourself. If you can think it, you can do it, cowboy. And the 10 most important 2 letter words I know are— ‘if it is to be, it is up to me.’

I read first in 1969, having at that time never heard of R. L. Stevenson, and continue to re-read it today, as it seemed to make sense of the world, an essay ‘The Eldorado, the Visionary Quest.’ I knew even then my life would be driven by desire and curiosity… just didn’t know where or how, and youth perhaps being wasted upon youth, as Twain said, didn’t make it any clearer (nor, does it necessarily on certain days even now). I share it with you, hoping it will be inspiring to you as well, with a reminder to consider attending its meaning every day.

Get back to work.

Hank.

The Eldorado, the Visionary Quest

“There is always an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward looking men and always we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life.

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever. Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theater unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science— the world is a mere arrangement of colors. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he (or she) wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.

Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colors. Happily we all shoot for the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are set on the inaccessible El Dorado; And when we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. A strange picture we make our way to our chimeras, ceasedly marching, grudging ourselves the time of rest; indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true we never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. Little do we know our own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.”

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