My very first year in undergrad, I took a course in philosophy, which impressed on me, among other things, the ease of critique compared with the difficulty of construction. Poking holes in others’ work is much less challenging than building something sturdy enough to resist such poking. Skepticism is safe: If you don’t commit yourself to an idea before you’re convinced it’s flawless, you’ll never have to commit to anything, because nothing will ever be that securely established; by never going anywhere, you avoid the danger of crashing along the way.

Roaring or whispering, it takes a constant wind to see a project of any size thru to completion. There’s a common notion that most of the work of creation involves coming up with a really good idea. Once you know what your show or book or painting or movie or whatever is about, the rest is just a sort of tedious, mechanical setting down of the work that already exists in your head. But it’s not like that. It’s not like that at all.

When I first encountered the idea that the evil inclination was necessary for human flourishing in shul, it was presented in less sexual terms — I more often heard the evil inclination being described as the ultimate source of the drive to make art, engage in politics, advance the limits of human knowledge — and it left me a little confused. The impulse to write a sonata seemed very far removed from the impulse to lie, and I had trouble making sense of the connection. I think I am finally coming into an understanding.

I am always thinking — worrying, even — about where stuff comes from. To get plain, undyed cloth with no particular embroidered ornamentation, you need all this vast apparatus of production, all these hours and hours of labor and years of learned skill. (There are few things as humbling as trying to spin thread even and fine enough to be woven into clothing using nothing more than a drop spindle and your own two hands.) I often read visions of idyllic, utopian futures where stuff just seems to pop magically into existence, as tho generated by a Star Trek replicator. No one has to harvest the fruit; no one has to lay sewage pipes; no one has to stitch together the pillowcases. But all of these things take work, and if you put that work out of mind, it’s all too easy to put the people who do that work out of mind as well. But without people doing that work, the work does not get done, and if the work does not get done, none of these things can exist.