Topical Guide 305
Mark Dorset
Projects: Ambitious
Goals: Attainable and Unattainable
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 ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 8
He who aims at progress, should aim at an infinite, not at a special benefit. . . . The soul can be appeased not by a deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she feels her wings. …
Your end should be one inapprehensible to the senses: then it will be a good always approached,—never touched; always giving health.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Method of Nature”
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
A project is the subjective germ of a developing object. A perfect project should simultaneously be entirely subjective and entirely objective—an indivisible and living individual. As to its origin, it should be entirely subjective, original, and possible only in this mind; as to its character, entirely objective, physical, and morally necessary. The sense for projects—which could be called aphorisms of the future—differs from the sense for aphorisms of the past only in direction, progressive in the former and regressive in the latter.
Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Aphorisms [1797–1800], #22
See also: Schemes and Dreams; Follies TG 41
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