The Supreme Artist by belegur

Chapter 6

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My Uncle called his work place a forge, but it wasn't a forge - it was a factory, a laboratory in which he was the only worker. A very long time ago, the place had been a forge, but then my Uncle evolved – he didn't need just a forge anymore, he needed the laboratory, the factory.

My Uncle's interests were spectacularly varied, so much that they would leave a lesser mind with nothing to show. He had a love for languages and mathematics, for astronomy and botany, poetry and painting, as if he perceived in everything a whole. I did not perceive such a whole, and the only time these things came together in my eye was in my Uncle. He was the development of world thought and invention jammed up in one person – a quick preview of a much more painful and slow development carried out by lesser minds in future millennia.

“I suffer from imaginary pains.” he would say “I know very well that the tides of happiness and sadness that follow me are imaginary. Nothing particularly good happens to me, but I am suddenly extremely happy. Then, nothing in my external situation changes, but I am suddenly extremely sad. These are imaginary. However, it was not always so. There was a time when purely scientific work would leave me clear-minded and balanced, and the arts would leave me emotionally raw. Or was it that I've done the sciences when I was balanced, and the arts when I was raw? I don't know. And now these, these swings without incentive, are not these just remembered reactions? Can these reactions then be forgotten?”

“Why don't you try, Uncle?” I would say “If it is causing you so much pain.”

“I have many things to do.” he would say and smile, and then I knew what happiness was work to him. But there were also darker days, when his demeanor would truly frighten me.

“Boredom, boredom.” he would then say and his eyes seemed utterly black because he would darken the forge on purpose in order not to do any more work “Do you even know how things seem to me? Everything is laid out for me as on a sparkling, limitless carpet but I don't feel the strength in me to take those things which I have already understood. And why should I? For others? So that they too would understand it? Why should I?”

I would stay silent, in order not to rouse him further, and with no vain delusions that I knew the answer to his problems. His problems were detached from the reality I knew, which was carefree and creative but with no deep shadow as the one which hung on his face. However, I had pangs of jealousy now and then, because my Uncle's existence seemed to me to be happening on another plain altogether and I, as all, longed for other worlds.

Most startling of all was his initiative – he needed no one's approval or encouragement to begin and finish a work, even tough he always wanted an audience. This I think also explains why he often wanted my company, as I was not his match in the matters of craft, but had enough understanding of it to admire him openly.

But his hard work was a trait of his that humbled others the most – we all felt lazy in comparison to him but the discrepancy was so great that we just remained in joyful awe of him and held no grudge against him. Jealousy was pointless in the face of such great ability. We only feel truly jealous when we think: 'Yes, I could have done that too'.