Daily Blague

Here in New York we are waiting for the weather to break. With a little luck, it will do so in a few hours. My shoulders are terribly sore, and I attribute this to the ongoing humidity; we shall see. I'm really fit for nothing but reading, which is okay, because I've been doing almost everything but in the past two weeks. I'm here, actually, because of a thought that this afternoon's reading has planted.

The source book is Jane Smiley's A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck. It's great, and I recommend it, but I'm not going to talk about the book itself now, not least because I haven't read all of it. I simply want to try out an idea. Ms Smiley has convinced me that horses - which, as she points out, have actually worked with human beings since prehistoric times - are capable of ambition. She has observed horses who perform above and beyond what they're asked to do, and I'm persuaded by her findings. It's a colossally interesting idea, because we're so mired in the association of ambition and payoff. There is no payoff for ambitious horses. There's simply the opportunity to do something that they're good at and that they like to do.

This amounts to a redefinition of "ambition."

There are plenty of people who think that they're ambitious for payoff, but by Ms Smiley's definition, this is not possible. You can plod and save, and you can finagle and gamble. Ambition has nothing to do with these approaches. Ambition means loving something that you do well and, as the book title has it, waiting for the money to follow. Or the fame.

This kind of ambition is not something that you can pursue or develop. It requires natural gifts. It requires a kind of undistracted energy that achieves results with grace. Once the gift is recognized, then it can be honed and disciplined, but the mere will to do something is not enough. This is why so many people who would like to be writers will never be read; writing begins with inborn abilities. Such abilities may have little or nothing to do with intelligence; I'm not sure, for example, that I attribute good writing exclusively to intelligence. And think of all those actors downtown who, for all their classes and try-outs, can't be ambitious because they haven't got the goods.

What is the special skill that mediocre but successful performers and politicans have? It's the ability to be at ease in public, among strangers. It's the desire to be onstage. Yes, you've probably got to be good looking, but being good looking isn't something that you do. Therein lies one of the mysteries of great beauty, and the emptiness that so often attends it.

There are undoubtedly people who are ambitious about sex. They may, but are unlikely to, be monogamous.

Something creative people hear all the time: "But you're doing something that you love. That makes up for the lousy pay." Well, it makes up for not being filthy rich. But poverty is not productive after a certain age. Nevertheless, there is a paradox of sorts here. In What's New, Pussycat?, Woody Allen's character tells Peter O'Toole's that he's got a job as a chorine dresser and, when he's asked what the job's worth, he names a low figure - adding, "It's all I could afford." He likes the job so much that he pays for the chance to do it. In our exchange-driven world, where money does not grow on trees, however, this is not a sustainable approach to life. People who do something really well will always be better-paid than people who don't, even though they do enjoy what they're doing and the others would rather be doing something else. Where ambition is lucrative (and it often isn't; consider mothering and the other domestic arts), the reward is double.

And ambition is thus doubly unfair. Anyhow, I hope I've just blown the possibility of excellence out of the "personal responsibility" rot.