Now the ques­tion is, what inspires man? Who draws inspir­a­tion from what? Every­one knows the Muses, those god­desses of inspir­a­tion who help cre­at­ors in everything from the writ­ing of his­tory to pros­ody, from com­edy to astro­nomy. The Muses were ori­gin­ally nymphs of the springs, and the inspir­a­tion received from them was the bless­ing of welling waters. They whispered the right thoughts to mor­tals, they gave inspir­a­tion, they aided the work of cre­ation. But the clas­sic­al age has been wan­ing for mil­len­nia, and it is as though the seat of the Muses of heav­enly inspir­a­tion had been taken by the scaly-headed, fear­some Gor­gons.

The poet's muse is usu­ally a woman. In a pat­ri­ot­ic age it is prin­ciples and ideals such as hero­ism, mag­nan­im­ity, flour­ish­ing, hon­our, self-sac­ri­fice. In a revolu­tion­ary age, fer­vour, free­dom, even viol­ence. And nowadays misery, suf­fer­ing, aber­ra­tion, dec­ad­ence and bru­tal­ity, or else lust, are for many the muse that inspires. An age sink­ing into mat­ter goes hand in hand with the manip­u­la­tion of base instincts, which opens up only false and wretched vis­tas.

As the per­son­al­ity takes shape, the self-image must grow stronger – a kind of ego­ism that springs from ripen­ing – and thus many of us are our own inspir­a­tion, our own spur. This is the infant­ile get­ting-syn­drome, when we build ourselves up from the ener­gies we have gathered. The sign of adult­hood and of a healthy, strong indi­vidu­al­ity is the giv­ing-syn­drome, when giv­ing has come to mean a great­er joy than get­ting. Then, besides one's own sense of self, other factors too come into play as spurs. The inspir­ing energy may be a prin­ciple, some aim or ideal, it may be an object, it may be anoth­er liv­ing being, or a qual­ity of that being.

The many, many secrets of your beauty and your soul's deep mys­tery

I seek in every­one I chance to meet.

And how many times I have been dis­ap­poin­ted, I could never tell. (Graeme Edge)

Many lose their way in the inspir­a­tion they draw from their fel­low men. To sus­tain their own life and their inspir­a­tion, they keep try­ing to draw in ever new people, new ener­gies: new exper­i­ences, new friend­ships, new loves… It is a ver­it­able hunt for other people's energy, yet true growth means that the rela­tion­ships we already have become ever deep­er and fuller. The per­son and being of anoth­er can be a very power­ful spur, wheth­er pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive, but things linked to that per­son at one remove can arouse subtler and per­haps more intense feel­ings, just as the per­son's absence can. A man's radi­ance, his being, per­meates the things he uses and his clothes, so that they too recall him and can stir intense emo­tions. That is why the san­dals of the mas­ters and the rel­ics of the saints are wor­shipped, and why a pho­to­graph of our moth­er or of our chil­dren lies tucked away in our wal­let. This is noth­ing other than fet­ish­ism in the good sense of the word, a fet­ish­ism long classed as noth­ing but a sexu­al aber­ra­tion, and yet the belong­ings, clothes, pic­ture, even the name of a being dear to us can call up the very per­son. Thus even a move­ment, a ges­ture, can become a source of ador­ing joy.

The chief spur of ideal­ists is the divine level, God him­self or the choir of angels, and that of the right­eous is the vir­tu­ous life; of ordin­ary people, their own prosper­ity; and of those who have sold their souls to the evil one, the diabol­ic­al level. These three steps are truth, half-truth and false­hood. More than once Saint Thomas Aqui­nas was caught up in rap­ture, even rising into the air, but diabol­ic­al pos­ses­sion too can work mir­acles. And evil shows res­ults soon­er than good – evil is act­ive, good is pass­ive. True, the vic­tory of good lies in its mere exist­ence; it need not pre­vail.