Don DeLillo quote ✍️

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As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or "terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes.
Don DeLillo Ratner's Star art concentration depression despair loneliness

Similar Crossword Answers

Answer Clues
ART 2083 clues
RELIEF 232 clues
MIND 222 clues
DOUBT 221 clues
DEATH 196 clues
DEPRESSION 160 clues
SARCASM 114 clues
GHOSTS 91 clues
THOUGHT 73 clues
OBSESSION 69 clues
DESPAIR 68 clues
CONCENTRATION 50 clues
SUSPICION 41 clues
SEXISM 38 clues
LONELINESS 36 clues
ADULTERY 28 clues
FEMINISM 10 clues
MISOGYNY 8 clues
PATRIARCHY 3 clues
Often perfumed powder
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Hint 1 meaning
A soft mineral of a soapy feel and a greenish, whitish, or grayish color, usually occurring in foliated masses. It is hydrous silicate of magnesia. Steatite, or soapstone, is a compact granular variety.
Hint 2 anagram
ALTC
Hint 3 another clue
BABY DOCTOR FOR SHORT
8 +1

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