Hans-Georg Gadamer

Everything I've done well I've done by accident and design, with accident having a slight advantage over design if only because accident always seems to have the last word.

Everything I've done well is a grace, grace occuring when accident and design meet at a moment neither of them can foresee.

By accident I mean the experience of not arriving in the place toward which I was initially travelling but arriving in a different place, and by design I mean the place toward which I was initially traveling. When I do something well it is as if what I've done and where I've arrived is designed by accident.

When I first moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco I thought at first that that part of my life, Los Angeles, had little to do with this part of my life, San Francisco. I held each place in my mind as different places, one born more from design than from accident and the other born more from accident than design. Living now in San Francisco is just beginning to feel like a grace.

As a poet I can see that there are writers who can only be themselves in poetry and writers who can only be themselves in prose.

Guston wrote about the generous law of art, and Gadamer spoke about the real conversation being horizonless.

As a philosopher I can see how a writer who holds himself or herself somewhere between accident and design, and keeps going forward between the two, has the best chance of making something of grace in art and in life.