The archaic antecedent of our word ‘inspired’ is to breathe life into or onto something: to pass on air through or upon a vessel and infuse it with an ineffable surging of will and motion. We know innately, habitually, we can recall it when prompted to, what inspires us, what breathes life into us with soft, impassioned and celestial lips: vistas of grand scale, slight curves of lovers, love itself as idea and mode of being, music in concert or alone in room, whether symphonic, heraldic, or singular, as in that of a guitar, missing a string perhaps, and elegiac. That word, apprehending afterwards the thing itself, means to us, as a culture, everything: to not be inspired is to be, by default, already in approach to death.
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