"Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise."
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) Letter 9
This is a favourite quote of mine, except that I prefer for our cultural creatives to seek and earn the consent of people, rather than disdain it. If you can win praise for giving people what they need, then yours is the world.
Petrarch scolded Dante for soliciting the ‘windy applause of the masses.’ That Dante won that applause by taking them down to Hell, then giving them the discipline of the mountain on the ascent, and then leading upwards into an unfathomable, intangible Paradise is testament to his genius.
Dante was the ultimate outsider. He wasn’t the creature of any time or place.
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