Great artists talk directly to God. Sometimes, more often than not, they do it only once. Maybe a handful of times, at best. Why God chooses some people to talk to and not others is a mystery that other artists love to savor and ponder and get jealous about, which is a solid reason to prefer the company of normal people instead.

The truth is that real artists tend to be as mysterious to themselves as they are to everyone else. If you ask why God chose them, the honest ones will tell you that they don’t have a clue. Some artists lead careful lives, shrewdly calculating their chances at earthly prizes, while others love to smoke and drink and fuck and drive fast cars. My own guess is that the kind of giftedness that I am describing is one of God’s typical little jokes, which tend to emphasize, affectionately or not, that man is a species of dust. The joke, as always, is on us. And as they put it in …