despair

cannot assimilate this despair
study it
for an artist's despair is not just personal
despairing the practice implicates all hope
Everytime an actor plays they are asking the question
Does the play hold good?
And the answer has to be yes
it is the condition upon which a actor's life depends. 

A River Sutra - Gita Mehta, a novel of quest stories woven into an exquisite tapestry of secular-humanistic philosophy;

"It does. It does. I could quote Chandidas, the great Hindu mystic poet. The river in the novel is holy to Lord Shiva, who could be described as a great humanist god of the arts, beyond gender. The humanist tradition is native to India. Zen Buddhist thinking comes, as you know, from the Indian "Dhyana." Zen is a corruption of the term "dhyan," which means awareness. I'm very happy with your characterization. But you know, funnily enough, these constructs I can see only after writing the book. It's such a funny book, it seemed to write itself. I don't know whether it was because I had the good fortune of sitting on the banks of a river. Later, when I was in Varanasi, I talked with a professor of Sanskrit at the Hindu University. I told him that I had put the narrator in the novel later. I was trying to bring mythological time, historical time, contemporary time, and narrative time - all into say one paragraph. And he said that, you know, the "Sutradhar" of classical Sanskrit drama was there precisely for this. Just sheer chance."

(interview via Eclogues )