creativeness in work

Tomorrow I leave for Ecuador, and will not have time to write for a while. So, taking the easy way out, here are a couple of quotes from Dorothy L. Sayers, as her thoughts have been in my mind lately.

"...the fallacy being that work is not the expression of man's creative energy in the service of Society, but only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure...
if a man's fulfilment of his nature is to be found in the full expression of his divine creativeness, then we urgently need a Christian doctrine of work, which shall provide, not only for proper conditions of employment, but also that the work shall be such as a man may do with his whole heart, and that he shall do it for the very work's sake."

and another:

"If that's the way your mind works, you'll be a writer one day," said Wimsey.

"Do you think so? How funny! That's what I want to be. But why?"

"Because you have the creative imagination, which works outwards, till finally you will be able to stand outside your own experience and see it as something you have made, existing independently of yourself. You're lucky."

"Do you really think so?" Hilary looked excited.

"Yes--but your luck will come more at the end of life than at the beginning, because the other sort of people won't understand the way your mind works. They will start by thinking you dreamy and romantic, and then they'll be surprised to discover that you are really hard and heartless. They'll be quite wrong both times--but they won't ever know it, and you won't know it at first, and it'll worry you."

"But that's just what the girls say at school. How did you know? . . . Though they're all idiots--mostly, that is."

"Most people are," said Wimsey, gravely, "but it isn't kind to tell them so. I expect you do tell them so. Have a heart; they can't help it. . . ."

so goes the dialogue between Wimsey and a sixteen-year old girl.