One Lifetime Isn’t Enough

I’m always intrigued by artistic output. How many songs does a musician generate over a lifetime? How many sonnets does a poet dream up?

As an author myself, I know many fellow writers and I can certainly pen 2-3 full length novels a year. Obviously, we’re not doing it just to generate words, but to create something truly beautiful. But it still begs the question, what happens to all those books? All that art?

It’s certainly way more than any publishing house can handle, and it explains how authors long dead still continue to come out with books (just look at Michael Crichton, Mark Twain, and Irene Nemirovski). Heck, there’s a new Frank Sinatra album coming out this year with 100 songs, 91 of which have never been heard by the public before, and that guy’s been dead for seventeen years!

My conclusion is that one lifetime simply isn’t enough for any single artist. An individual can generate so much art over the course of a few decades that it ends up taking many more decades after their death just for all of it to reach an audience. Food for thought.

But the bright side is, there’s more than enough books, music, and art in this world for the rest of us to last a lifetime.