I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the profound satisfaction derived from capturing a remarkable photograph compared to writing a great story.
Teju Cole reflects on the unique joy he finds in photography, suggesting that the combination of luck, magic, and hard work involved in taking a great photograph gives him a deeper sense of fulfillment than the achievement of creating an excellent piece of writing. This perspective highlights the special qualities of visual art compared to literary expression, where the unexpected element of magic plays a significant role.
In practice
During a photography exhibition, I shared this quote to emphasize the magic behind each captured moment.
The original sense of the word 'influence' is 'to flow into.' For the most part, these writers that I admire... their style flows into me without my intervention, which is what explains the broad range of writers who I've been compared with; it reflects my reading.
The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.
To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader.
Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
It is one thing to photograph people. It is another to make others care about them by revealing the core of their humanness.
Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
It takes ten years, usually, to make a dancer. It takes ten years of handling the instrument, handling the material with which you are dealing, for you to know it completely.
A good story, just like a good sentence, does more than one job at once. That's what literature is: a story that does more than tell a story, a story that manages to reflect in some way the multilayered texture of life itself.
Anybody that creates anything is just creating new compositions of things that have existed before. We're all creating something, we're all creating our own personal works of art in ourselves.
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