No person can achieve excellence in a popular genre without a rigorous and undeviating commitment to providing a personal best at all times. At the first moment of compromise - the first "dumbing down" for "easier" or "wider" acceptability, the first boilerplating for reasons of simple weariness or an overcommitted schedule - one simply falls into the abyss. (I rarely speak so harshly, but I do believe that this particular gate remains so strait, and this special path so narrow.)
Truly excellent things are inspiring, are generally superior to so much of mediocrity, they carry more of a person's soul and commitment in them and automatically draw the eyes to what reigns within them. And since we be such influencible creatures, this mimetic ape, is fortunate to find excellence, inspiration like that. We learn, are influenced and informed by such things.
I really like his reference to personal best. Anyone can be anywhere, in their own personal circumstances and yet make up their mind, or collect themselves to try and do their best. I know, I know it is tangential from what perhaps he means, but the inspiration to make wherever you are amenable to a personal best is priceless.
I guess excellence has such a pushing of the envelope, opening of space, flowering of universe feeling to it, it just lifts up the one encountering as well. Here's to keep looking for excellent things, instances, ideas, works.
Later he says:
Even the most trifling materials in our panoply of forms can, in the right hands, be clothed in the magic of excellence.
One got to be inspired by the freedom it opens up. The lightness of being, the composure of self, and the mastery or personal best of whatever one is working with. The weight of the stuff in the world, the noise, the fragments of ideas, the horizontal circulation of more and more, and yet this beautiful promise of almost nothing and magic of a master.
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