It sometimes happens when one reads an author's entire body of work, a sinking feeling rises and then comes the thought 'this is all you did in your life?' For fifty years you endeavored and the result is mediocrity. Truly there may be gems in the roughes of those lifetimes, but when one looks at the trees for the forest, the author becomes desolate where the works were lively: themes repeat across books and a dreadful, all-consumning case of stagnation in thought and execution. Passions that shape books and embark on novel traind of thought seem small and sad, inane. Ah, the corpus of the writer proudly proclaims like bold words engraved on tombstone head: I lived and I treaded alphabet water!

Yes, through their works (who could say if there is a specific author in mind here?) manytimes the author's conception of the world opens up and is shown to all to be dull, simplistic... Perhaps this is harsh, to judge their lives pathetic. But, I say, depiction and perception (in both writing and drawing) do not make for a stirring life; writing is dull without living and so these pathetic authors should have lived! If only notes on one's body of literature could be passed beyond the grave, perhaps reaching the author in time to help inform their actions in a reincarnation scenario. Or that they could return in a new life and spread the wisdom they harvested in those latter, grave-approaching years . If life did not pass us by before we grasped it...

All the writings of an author are linked, variety in work inevitably just the different aspects of self, depicting the writer's personality not only in the present but as it extends across time, the ways in which the person changed and was changed. It may be personality is fourth dimension and one can never escape the self.

Stone stood for a thousand years and was obliterated to dust. The dust worked into the soil...

Sad face, listless pencil. Curl up and go to sleep. Another side of the mind notes that a systematic study of the face is in short order.

But no more of the past complaints about marathons and misery, I think: too long have I mumbled on about the difficulty of drawing a circle each day. It is become a part of life and no longer an ordeal, and so there is no longer a complaint to me maid. Drawing an episode of animation in less than 330 days, however; that might warrant some complaints along the way.

Oh, these latter, grave-approaching years.