“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Ruburt’s reading in college, and his friends there, led him to believe that the artistically gifted were not too well equipped to handle normal living. He thought they were fascinating, charming, self-destructive, and wasted most of their time in emotional and sexual excursions leading nowhere. He was determined not to fall into that trap. He did not realize that the people he knew — Nelson Hayes, for example, and Mauzet—were not basically artists, in this case writers. They would never write the books they talked about. But he made his judgment.

You had highly conflicting ideas about “the world of working people” and the world of the artist. You both made many artificial divisions there, but over the years you became determined, both of you, to spend as much or more time at your work as our hypothetical working man in the factory.

In a manner of speaking, and in the terms of this discussion, you adapted the methods of the Protestant work ethics to your creative endeavors. Lest people decide that you were lax or lazy or irresponsible, you were determined to show that you not only worked as hard as they did, but harder. They might have vacations, but not you. They might quit at five, but not you. I am speaking here of you both. To some degree, you squeezed your exuberance into a tight fit, and tried to make a creative productivity regulate itself, to fit the industrial time clock: so many hours bringing a feeling of virtue, even if the attitude itself cut down on the exuberance of inspiration.