If you could have a talent – not for making money but simply to enjoy – which would you choose, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing or dancing?
I’d choose painting because I could do it while listening to my books. Theoretically, I could listen while drawing but I don’t see the point of drawing anything besides people, and that requires models, so that’s out.
Dancing, the greatest art because the most impalpable.
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I was going to put playing a musical instrument but forgot. Of course, it’s a major talent.
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I’d say dancing, but since I have no one to dance with, it would be a little pointless. So I’d take singing.
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Singing.
It is no good having the other ones without the body capable of performing it, but one can sing all the way down the years to the grave.
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Unless you are like me, and people are ready to pay you money for not singing because I’m that bad.
No, scratch that. I’m horrific. Atrocious.
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I draw and sing anyway. The trick to talents is dedicating a lot of time to pursuing them… I could wish for more time.
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“… I don’t see the point of drawing anything besides people, and that requires models …”
I used to draw Futurist Manifestos in the form of new buildings, because what else is an architectural plan but some kind of Futurist Manifesto the backers wish to build?
During which would come the inevitable painting and colouring phase in which the backers wanted something sort of Renzo Piano without actually being Renzo Piano, just so they could imprint it with whatever vague sense of style they’d like to believe in that wasn’t a doppio shot of neo-classical post-modern ironic Western-styled Soviet constructivism with some geometric architectural treatments sprinkled on top (sometimes literally).
Then of course there would be the inevitable Site Plan in which we’d have some kind of sculpted mock-up, sometimes complete with little petit bourgeois wandering around it as if they didn’t have anything else more sensible to do.
So technically the first three on your list were a career.
Dancing and singing … sounds overly exertive.
I could go along with being like Kraftwerk, just standing there and unleashing torrents of musical notes while the listeners endure the shock. (The Bill Bailey version looks like fun.)
But the thing is that if I take on hobbies, I tend to do them to the point that they turn into mini-careers or full-blown things resembling careers.
“Oh, that’s really lovely, could you do something like that for us?”
And that’s a career after that.
If I were to have a talent I could enjoy, it would be the ability to take flawlessly accurate photos that I’d be able to reach inside and change without anyone noticing. 🙂
[hears a faint ghostlike whisper saying something like SCP-105 …]
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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