ich it is to thrive.

On a closer examination, it seems as though, in the case of a genius,
the will to live, which is the spirit of the human species, were
conscious of having, by some rare chance, and for a brief period,
attained a greater clearness of vision, and were now trying to secure
it, or at least the outcome of it, for the whole species, to which the
individual genius in his inmost being belongs; so that the light which
he sheds about him may pierce the darkness and dullness of ordinary
human consciousness and there produce some good effect.

Arising in some such way, this instinct drives the genius to carry
his work to completion, without thinking of reward or applause or
sympathy; to leave all care for his own personal welfare; to make his
life one of industrious solitude, and to strain his faculties to
the utmost. He thus comes to think more about posterity than about
contemporaries; because, while the latter can only lead him astray,
posterity forms the majority of the species, and time will gradually
bring the discerning few who can appreciate him. Meanwhile it is with
him as with the artist described by Goethe; he has no princely patron
to prize his talents, no friend to rejoice with him:

_Ein Fuerst der die Talente schaetzt,
Ein Freund, der sich mit mir ergoetzt,
Die haben leider mir gefehlt_.

His work is, as it were, a sacred object and the true fruit of his
life, and his aim in storing it away for a more discerning posterity
will be to make it the property of mankind. An aim like this far
surpasses all others, and for it he wears the crown of thorns which
is one day to bloom into a wreath of laurel. All his powers are
concentrated in the effort to complete and secure his work; just as
the insect, in the last stage of its development, uses its whole
strength on behalf of a brood it will never live to see; it puts its
eggs in some place of safety, where, as it well knows, the young will
one day find life and nourishment, and then dies in confidence.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Art of Literature, by Arthur Schopenhauer

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