On Inspiration

This quote is from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. I came across it when I was in Mombasa, three months into a journey across Africa.

It's about an Englishman, Charles Ryder. Disillusioned with life and his own art, he travels to Central America in search of inspiration.

It is long, but totally worth it.

But as the years passed, I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain House and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand - in a word, the inspiration. In quest of this fading light I went abroad, in the augustan maner, laden with the apparatus of my trade, for two years refreshment among alien styles. I did not go to Europe; her treasures were safe, too safe, swaddled in expert care, obscured by reverence. Europe could wait. There could be a time for Europe, I thought; all too soon the days would come when I should need a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could not venture more than an hour's journey from a good hotel; when I should need soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old eyes to Germany and Italy. Now while I had the strength I would go to the wild lands where man had deserted his post and the jungle was creeping back to its old strongholds.

Accordingly, by slow but not easy stages, I travelled through Mexico and Central America in a world which had all I needed, and the change from parkland and hall should have quickened me and set me right with myself. I sought inspiration among gutted palaces and cloisters embowered in weed, derelict churches where the vampire-bats hung in the dome like dry seed-pods and only the ants were ceaselessly astir tunneling in the rich stalls; cities where no road led, and mausoleums where a single, agued family of Indians sheltered from the rains. There in the great labour, sickness, and occasionally in some danger, I made the first drawings for RYDER'S LATIN AMERICA. Every few weeks I came to rest, finding myself once more in the zone of trade and tourism, recuperated, set up my studio, transcribed my sketches, anxiously packed the complete canvasses, dispatched them to my New York agent, and then set out again, with my small retinue, into the wastes. I was in no great pains to keep in touch with England. I followed local advice for my itinerary and had no settled route, so that much of my mail never reached me, and the rest accumulated until there was more than could be read at a sitting. I used to stuff a bundle of letters into my bag and read them when I felt inclined, which was in circumstances so incongruous - swinging in my hammock, under the net, by the light of a storm-lantern; drifting down river, amidships in the canoe, with the boys astern of me lazily keeping our nose out of the bank, with the dark water keeping pace with us, in the green shade, with the great trees towering above us and the monkeys screeching in the sunlight, high overhead among the flowers on the roof of the forest; on the veranda of a hospitable ranch, where the ice and the dice clicked, and a tiger cat played with its chain on the mown grass - that they seemed voices so distant as to be meaningless; their matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like the facts about themselves which fellow travelers distribute so freely in American railway trains. But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole. I discarded the experiences of those two years with my tropical kit and returned to New York as I had set out. I had a fine haul - eleven paintings and fifty odd drawings - and when eventually I exhibited them in London, the art critics, many of whom hitherto had been patronizing in tone, as my success invited, acclaimed a new and richer note in my work. ' Mr Ryder', the most respected of them wrote, 'rises like a fresh young trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture and discloses a powerful facet in the vista of his potentialities ... By focusing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism, Mr Ryder has at last found himself.' Grateful words, but, alas, not true by a long chalk. My wife, who crossed to New York to meet me and saw the fruits of our separation displayed in my agent's office, summed the thing up better, by saying: 'Of course, I can see they're perfectly brilliant and really rather beautiful in a sinister way, but somehow I don't feel they are quite you.'