sent from: Esher, Surrey, UK. destination: Los Angeles, California, USA

In Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians”, so far a fun amalgam of Harry Potter, The Name of the Wind and The Secret Benedict Society, he says this about his characters Quentin and Eliot, young new magicians in a magic space just adjacent to the real world, in whose world it is summer while late-autumn comes to the real world: 

“As they drifted home they were passed by a few other boats.. the occupants looked grim and bundled up against the cold. They couldn’t perceive, or somehow weren’t part of, the August heat that Quentin and Eliot were enjoying. They were warm and dry and didn’t even know it. The terms of the enchantment locked them out.” 

“They”, in the latter part of the sentence, could refer to the people in the passing boats, but I prefer to think that it refers to Quentin and Eliot themselves, two over-achieving depressives whose abilities have given them access to a world, a magical workld, that because of those same abilities they are incapable of appreciating.
For me this is the creative mindset, the life of an artist – the same thing that makes you creative, that gives you the drive to do it, also prevents you from ever appreciating the amazing world in which you live.