themarginalian.org · 5 hours ago

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time – the Marginalian

Mary Oliver understood that the greatest threat to creative work is not the ringing phone or the knock at the door, but the self turning against itself - what she called the "intimate interrupter," that inner voice suddenly urgent about dentist appointments and missing mustard. In her essay "Of Power and Time," explored here by Maria Popova, Oliver maps the three selves that inhabit every person and argues that the rarest among them - the one that carries the artist's hunger - "is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity." What she asks of anyone who feels that hunger is not talent or inspiration but loyalty: "creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity." The essay is ultimately a quiet reckoning with what it costs to answer a calling and what it costs not to - and Oliver leaves little doubt which loss runs deeper.