Time & Perspective Quote by Willa Cather

Art isn’t a talent you stumble into; it’s a second birth you force into being, with all the pain and intention that metaphor implies. When Willa Cather writes, “Every artist makes himself born,” she yanks creativity out of the soft-focus realm of inspiration and plants it in the body: blood, labor, time. The phrase “makes himself” is doing heavy lifting. It frames the artist not as a chosen vessel but as a self-authoring project, someone who has to manufacture the conditions for their own arrival. That’s an especially pointed claim from a novelist who built her career around people remaking themselves on the American frontier, where identity is less inheritance than construction.

The sly turn comes in the comparison: “harder than the other time, and longer.” Birth, the one we mythologize as the great beginning, gets demoted to a brief biological event. The real ordeal, Cather suggests, is the prolonged emergence into artistic adulthood: years of false starts, humiliating apprenticeships, the slow acquisition of taste, and the even slower discipline required to meet it. There’s also a quiet rebuke to the romantic fantasy of the “natural” genius. If you’re waiting to be discovered, you’re already lost.

In Cather’s context - a woman writing in a literary culture that often treated seriousness as male property - the line doubles as a survival manual. Becoming an artist isn’t just self-expression; it’s self-creation under pressure, done publicly, over time, and without guarantees.