🎧 305: Like an artist ...

LIKE AN ARTIST who finds, to his excitement and terror, that he’s come up with an idea so large and consuming that he may have to spend the rest of his life trying to realize it, who wakes in the night terrified and thrilled, having seen in his dreams a vision of his busy future, Herb saw how much work he was going to have to do before he made even the smallest of public steps in selling, because his move into selling would create the first impression of him as a salesman, an impression that had to be the right one if the enterprise was to prosper. So he studied and listened and watched, and, in his mind, he practiced selling, while he was lying awake in bed or daydreaming at the culling table where most of his mind was free, while he was fixing or making some little thing, or while he was relaxing in the tub at night while Lorna read to him. He practiced selling to the people he knew, using what he knew about them. What he imagined himself selling — because it was the most difficult thing he could imagine selling, something the burglar hadn’t even disturbed — was Lorna’s duck.
     If Lorna suspected that perhaps Herb had lost interest in selling, lost his ambition or shifted the object of his ambition to some position in the clam-packing plant, she was nonetheless determined that he should follow his inclination, do whatever it was he thought best. The future she had envisioned when she’d closed her eyes that night on Lake Serenity had been a future with Herb, not a future with Herb in a specific place or with Herb doing a specific kind of work or supporting a specific way, level, or style of living. If she had to, she would provide the things that Herb’s clam-plant salary couldn’t. After the burglary, without telling Herb, she approached Joseph the Jeweler, who had a shop downtown, about working on an as-needed basis, repairing ivory pieces, restoring cameos, and doing engraving. She got a little work, and when her skill and talent became clear, she got a great deal more. She was able to stay as busy as she wanted, and she brought in money that made a big difference in the way she and Herb were able to live.
     Herb noticed; he noticed every dollar she brought into the household (even the dollars that she tried to hide by spending them on meat of better quality or out-of-season vegetables, things she hoped Herb wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t think of as expenses), and he counted those dollars as debits against his future earnings. Every now and then, however, when an Occasion was approaching, he’d feel that paying Lorna back in the future wasn’t good enough, that it wasn’t fair of him to make Lorna wait to have the things he wanted her to have or do the things he wanted her to be able to do, and at those times he would suggest a trip to Boston to visit his uncle Benjamin.

In Topical Guide 305, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Ambitious and Goals: Attainable and Unattainable from this episode.

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