Originality

I've been thinking a lot lately about originality-true originality. How do you know when something you say or write is genuinely original? I used to think achieving genuine originality was a simple thing: just don't borrow from other works of art or scholarship and what you've done is original. That sounds so childish now. (I guess it makes sense that it was though, doesn't it?)

Reality is naturally much more complex than that. How does one really know that their work is original when there's SO MUCH art and scholarship out in the world already? When you have a thought, how do you know if someone else has had it already? How do you know if someone else has published their idea? After all, just because something is original to you doesn't mean it's original to the world.

It's also possible to copy someone else's work without knowing it (as opposed to copying it consciously or copying it without ever having known it existed). Paul McCartney dreamt the tune to "Yesterday" in 1963 (then called "Scrambled Eggs") but didn't record it for years, worrying he was stealing the tune from someone else. He hummed it to everyone he knew for years, and no one had heard it before so finally he recorded it. Wise choice.

George Harrison (unfortunately) also woke up one day with a tune in his head-the tune to "My Sweet Lord". George sadly didn't bother to hum to the tune to anyone he knew though and was eventually sued for ripping off the tune-he'd stolen it verbatim from "She's So Fine". Oops.

W.B. Yeats had a theory about originality that I've really come to embrace. He said that the only way to become a truly original artist was by mastering all the classics that preceded you, imitating them (to get to know them and yourself), and then and only then can you branch out from that and become an original artist. You can see this in Yeats's own career as he got more and more abstract and strange (but creative and original) the older he got.

Still, it's never possible to know for sure. It's also silly to worry too much about it. Thomas Jefferson was accused of plagiarism throughout his entire career, and had a standard response to such an accusation: "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing", he said he drew his ideas from "the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in letters, printed essays or in the elementary books of public rights, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc." I dig that too.

Chice