No man is original save he who solitarily knows that he is, and he who knows that he is, never says that he is. Thus it can be known that those who say they are – are not. Of course, if you must be told how to tell if someone is original or not – then you yourself are not.
If thought is the only possible place for originality, and thus freedom, then how do you get loose from the omnipresent thoughts of others? Not by continued involvement with them, not in any fashion. Not by fault finding explorations thereof; that is unnecessary. Whatever their thoughts, they are faulty. There is no need to investigate. All of their thoughts are unoriginal and ergo, imprisonment, and you becoming engrossed in critical analysis thereof only makes you a prisoner also.
You cannot talk your way out of a jail made of words, no matter what key you come up with to fit an existing lock. You coming up with it will cause the introduction of a new lock, which will reject your key, and so on. You cannot think your way out of a prison whose walls are invisible, yet are just as strong as any thoughts you have of escape, since the unseen walls themselves are composed of thoughts. Efficiency! It is efficiency through self-fueling captivity, and suppression-of-originality.
Only the dense and inefficient believe and call themselves original, and only they suffer from this belief. Many try to hide behind becoming a supporter of the ideas of some previous person, who has now been proclaimed to have been original. Thus, by becoming slavish to his deemed, original thoughts, you have, by clever association, become yourself, original. Those who can stand this, do this and stand this. But he born with the true hunger to be original cannot abide circumstances in which his already unoriginal thought is submitted to another’s. To these, the illusion of originality is not even a maybe.
You cannot be original in a crowd. True artistry is possible only in private, and with your head filled with the thoughts of others, there is no place of privacy. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by dancing with other people’s ideas. Whatever they are, they are neither right nor wrong, simply useless. It matters not a whit whether you embrace them and dance them, forward or backward. Whether you agree or disagree with them matters not. You have totally wasted your time on this vacuous dance floor.
J.