Podcast #52: Sarah Lewis and Anna Deavere Smith on Inspiring Failures
Is failure what keeps us going? This is the question Sarah Lewis's The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery centers around. The author, curator, and historian offers a tantalizing view of near-greatness in her book, which tells the stories of how some of the greatest talents in history grappled with the pursuit of perfection. This week, we're thrilled so share her conversation with Anna Deavere Smith at LIVE from the NYPL. The two discuss failed dreams, loss, and inspiration.
A New Yorker, Lewis spoke about the New York Public Library as an ecosystem for dreams:
"I grew up about ten blocks away from the New York Public Library’s main stage here, and I would come really to dream. Not always to check out books, I would come to the Rose Reading Room to dream, and what I never would have expected is that I was dreaming about a book that would seem to be to do with the very opposite of what often dreams are about—adversity, failure, and the gift of those things. As I worked in the arts, I really wanted to write about what I saw happening in artists’ studios that wasn’t public oftentimes. These back-turned paintings that artists weren’t going to burn or kind of throw out, but were important for what they did want to show me. So the book is really looking at—as an atlas of the stories of the lives of so many different entrepreneurs and inventors and artists and athletes, to understand what it is that led to their rise."
This atlas of stories includes some about the role of surrender in the grieving process. Lewis recalled the way that she has personally dealt with loss:
"Over the course of a year and a half, I lost friends in quick succession. This was when I was in my young twenties after college and due to 9/11, but others were accidents and I hadn’t fully let myself process it... And I wrote about surrender in this chapter as it relates to grief and this need to finally let go of what’s sort of holding you and in that moment for me at least that release that came when I saw that I was still here, you know, and that I wanted to live my life in a way that really showed that consciousness and appreciation that I was still here and I in that moment felt that I would need to be free enough to do things and possibly fail in order to become my fullest self, you know. "
In some ways, the self, as Lewis imagines it, is developed and tested through a quest. She spoke about this striving as the engine behind creative work:
"The quest is about that internal landscape, you know, that gap. What’s making someone like William Faulkner publish The Sound and the Fury and still not be happy with it so he rewrites it five times and then republished an appendix, even though it’s acclaimed and it’s a success. I think I see Will Smith in that vein because I think his pursuit is about a kind of a mastery, not a kind of success, not being happy just with box-office acclaim, but by trying to actually push himself to be another kind of a character again and again."
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