A quote for your weekend.
Make-believe partakes of the nature of a magic ritual. We not only pretend to be what we are not, but by staging our pretense, we strive to conjure and bring into existence a new genuineness. The strange thing is that often this conjuring act succeeds and we become what we pretend to be. – Eric Hoffer
This is the greatest trick of the creative soul. We envision the person we could be, the art we could create, the stories we could write, the roles we might assume, the music we might play, long before we are able to bring them into being. Our early efforts do not reflect the fullness of our vision.
In time, however, the act of make-believe refines and perfects our ability to create. Our work emerges and we become who we are supposed to be.
The quote originally appeared in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by philosopher Eric Hoffer, in which he examined how mass movements arise to challenge the existing social hierarchy.
The quote appears here via an epigraph in A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966-1967, a collection of photography by William Gedney, which was unpublished in his lifetime. Gedney curated the maquette in the late 1960s but was unable to find a publisher before his death from AIDS in 1989. Some fifty years later, the executor of his artistic legacy was finally able to bring the project to life.
None of Gedney’s work was published in his lifetime, but in assembling his collections of photography, he engaged in the kind of make-believe that eventually conjured up something magical – work that came into being and continues to thrive years after his passing.
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