I picked up The Writing Life by Annie Dillard yesterday. I didn’t expect it to have anything worth mentioning on this blog, but here I am four pages in, and already proven wrong.

“Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length he turned to the young man: ‘You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?’ The young photographer said, ‘Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.’”