Finding of the week, absolutely must-read:
Joseph Epstein on the Brain, a book review.
Excerpts:

«I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy -- once you have these in place, you are set to go.»

«Much of what is known about the brain has been acquired through the study and correction of injuries: strokes, aphasias, tumors, and various sad jigeroos. Everyone has encountered such dirty tricks at work. I had a dentist who, after a stroke, lost his powers of recalling proper names or of following the simplest narratives. He killed himself. An acquaintance who suffers bipolar disease, considering shock therapy, was told that its exact effects could not be predicted; it was, the neurologist in charge added, like "restarting one’s computer," which, as we all know, sometimes works wonders and sometimes is no help at all.»

«Certainly we have plenty of psychologically wounded writers: Dostoevsky, Melville, Baudelaire, Conrad. Then there are the drunks: Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and countless others. And let us not forget the dear drug addicts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas DeQuincey, William S. Burroughs, and the entire charmless Beat generation.»

«Alas, these experiences are a good deal less than convincing, and for one simple reason: the person telling us about them is less than a first-class writer. She belongs, rather, to the category of the cheerful amateur. "Reading the New York Times Book Review every week," Dr. Flaherty notes, "was a major part of my literary education"-- a statement akin to claiming that one has learned how to fly by reading Superman comics. As a writer, not only does Dr. Flaherty use language in a loose and often dopey way, not only does she split infinitives with the easy exuberance of young Abe Lincoln splitting logs, but she provides no striking phrases or arresting metaphors, she over-dramatizes her own experience, lapses into cuteness and unconscious self-gratulation, and everywhere betrays many other marks of the amateur scribbler.»

«The choice of writing as a living and a way of life is more complex than is likely to show up in a neurologist’s PET scan. Nor, unlike in other artistic fields -- music, the visual arts -- does literary talent make such a life any easier by appearing early. "No Mozarts in literature," more than a well-known saying, is a fact. There are not too many Joseph Conrads, either, and Conrad published his first book when he was thirty-eight.»

«If one cannot learn one’s craft through formal schooling, if one is highly unlikely to earn a good living at it, and if the writer’s vocation tends to bring out the less pleasant side of one’s nature, why would anyone want to risk it? (H. L. Mencken had no tolerance for the little Iliad of woes I have just compiled. When writers complained to him about the arduousness of their lot, he used to propose that they go try a week on an assembly line.)»

«Where do the words come from? The same mysterious place, I suspect, where notes of music go. They precede ideas, and are inseparable from them. For myself, I bow my head, touch wood, and utter a small prayer that the flow of them never cease.»