Quotations: Excellence and Standards

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal...

Ultimately it is the yearning to believe that anyone can be brought up to college level that has brought colleges down to everyone's level.

It's certainly easy to mock some things. Oddly enough, I've never found it easy to mock anything of value, only things that are tawdry and fatuous. Maybe it's just me.

Possibly the only dismaying aspect of excellence is that it makes living in a world of mediocrity an ongoing prospect of living hell. The subtle distressing perturbation....

Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better.

Sadly, most lives are fashioned on that pattern. Settling for what is possible; buying into the cliché because the towering dream is out of stock; learning how to avoid taking the risk of the dizzying leap. Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) wrote: "in order to attain the impossible one must attempt the absurd." So the paradigm becomes all the Salieri shadows unable to touch the Mozart reality, all the respectably-talented but not awesomely-endowed Antonios fulminating with frustration at the occasional Amadeus. Excellence in the untalented and ordinary produces pleasure and awe; but in the minimally-talented it produces hatred and envy that boils like sheep fat.

Excellence is its own master, owes no allegiance, bows its head to no regimen. It exists pure and whole like the silver face of the moon. Untouchable, unreachable, exquisite. But frustrating because it reminds us of how much mediocrity we put up with, just to get through the week....

In any field of endeavor, in any medium of the arts or sciences, an occasional talent will manifest itself and, through bare existence, we perceive how mundane has been the effort in that field or genre, that medium or category....Name the highest and brightest and more accomplished till you get to Fellini or Billie Holiday or George Bernard Shaw; and compare; and recognize how much higher thereafter is the high water mark. Suddenly, there is more sunlight in the world.

Harlan Ellison, in his introduction to Neil Gaiman's Season of Mists

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Everyone's ass is up for grabs with every single post. Nothing is sacred, everything is evaluated. How else could it work? What, if not the quality of your posts, could elevate *you* above the unwashed masses?