For the practice of any art to thrive, its masters must embrace their responsibility faithfully to transmit to their proteges the tacit knowledge, intuitions, and heuristics they've won through a lifetime of experience.
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It's hard, subtle work, and it takes time away from the practice of the art itself, but helping young artists is no less necessary, and ultimately even more important.
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What makes this work so challenging is that the obsession needed to achieve mastery is isolating; masters give so much of their time to their art that they seldom have enough of it left to become "people persons."
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Masters know things whose value is inestimable; once lost, their unique wisdom may be gone forever (or at least for generations.) Reinventing the wheel is a miserably slow ordeal, but masters who die without transmitting their knowledge condemn their successors to it.
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The transmission of that species of inarticulate wisdom that is the peculiar achievement of the master calls for skills whose cultivation is itself a large and demanding undertaking. But experience shows that it is possible to do it well.
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Some old masters produce new masters with enviable consistency, often without evident effort. To many, it seems yet another ineffable gift bestowed by fate on a lucky few. But this attitude is conveniently defeatist. It lets those who find the job difficult off the hook.
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In fact, the nurturing of young artists is by no means entirely mysterious. A superficial examination of those who do it well may yield discouragingly little insight into their methods. But that does not mean that no intelligible methods exist.
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Those masters who decline to ponder how best to nurture young artists condemn their own art to a debilitating senescence. They may produce in abundance themselves, but without a posterity capable of appreciating and building on their work, it will inexorably fade and wither.
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