Today I talked with an artist and a poet about luck. The artist (a man) is in his sixties; the poet (a man) is in his twenties. The artist is a cheerful curmudgeon, a man of years; the poet is sweetly irreverent, and still expecting, before he is too much older, his fame day. We started to talk about a book only two of the three of us had read. It soon became clear that the poet, though socially irreverent, was, in his mind and opinions, hard and unforgiving, while the curmudgeon was a man of great compassion. I was speaking in defense of this book, and the poet was speaking against it. He called the book “lucky”—as in, the writer had not been talented or deserving of his success. He’d been fortuitous; he’d stumbled into fame. This assertion made the artist come to the defense of the writer he did not know and the book he’d never read. He spoke sternly to the poet, like a father to his son of whom he is cautiously proud but also a little envious. “That’s a cheap shot to call a person lucky,” he said. “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.”

—Heidi Julavits

Transcribed by me from page 228 of The Folded Clock: A Diary, © 2015 Doubleday.

Tweet: “Everyone relies on luck to succeed.” Also hard work.
Tweet: Don’t judge the success of others; there’s enough luck to go around.

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