His own power and magic — overwhelmed him for a moment with a feeling of the purest, highest, and most glorious happiness that life can yield — the happiness that is at once the most selfish and the most selfless — the happiness of the artist when he sees that his work has been found good, has for itself a place of honour, glory, and proud esteem in the hearts of men, and has wrought upon their lives the spell of its enchantment. At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being — the reward he seeks — the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.

Thomas Wolfe Carolinian

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