You can’t be tired yet — it is too early. Rather than condemning your problems, go into them. Each problem has a message to deliver. A problem does not exist without roots. No problem is irrelevant. Howsoever silly and absurd it appears it has some roots in your being; otherwise it wouldn’t be there. How can it be there? There must be some cause behind it. Just make it a play. There is no need to drop anything. I am not in favour of any renunciation. Nothing has to be dropped, but everything has to be transformed. Dropping a thing is escaping, it doesn’t help, and you don’t change by dropping it; you remain the same. You will do something else and that will become work, because it is not a question of what you do: it is a question of your attitude and approach. The same thing can be done as work and the same thing can be done as play. So the question is not there, in what you are doing; the question is how you are doing it, with what attitude and approach. That has to be changed. Or think of the future — some plan, some fantasy, something that you want to do tomorrow — and the flower fades, bows out further and further. The more deep in thought you go, the farther the flower recedes. Come out of the thought and the sky is clear, the clouds have separated and again the sunshine and again the presence of the flower; you can again smell it. While you were thinking of the past and the future the smell was still knocking at the doors of your nose, but you were not available. The colour of the flower was still coming to your eyes but you were not there. It was as if you were looking through a dark glass; things became unclear, hazy, a mist surrounded you. It is just that if you have a very very intelligent mind, with intelligent people that is the problem: they cannot enjoy; everything seems below them. Everything is dirt and useless. Intelligent people become very very clever in condemning things; they cannot appreciate anything. If you tell them ‘Look at the moon’, they will say ‘So what? What is there?’ And they have destroyed it! It is very easy to criticise, and there is no way to prove that the moon has beauty. If you are not willing to see it, there is simply no way to prove that there is any beauty. Just those two words ‘So what?’ are enough to destroy the whole beauty. All the poets are cancelled just those two words ‘So what?’ You have cancelled so easily all the great efforts that man has made. To create is very difficult, to criticise is very simple. Even to write two lines of poetry is difficult. But one can see Shakespeare or Milton or Tennyson and can say ‘What is that? What is there? I don’t see any poetry.’ And there is no way to show it. This has to be understood.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/17/bible-religion-andrew-motion
