"True worth is in being, not seeming."
- Alice Cary
To be "cut off from creative participation in a sphere or culture"*. To be cut off from what was sustaining and conducive to one's creativeness by external forces beyond ones ability to control or change resulting in "anxiety of meaningless ...the loss of that which gave meaning to all meaning."*
The danger that results, should that which once cut off one from creative participation is removed, is that one now finds themselves in a present period that is so different from the period before the initial cut off, that even though now free to go back to that which was conducive and sustaining, one finds those things no longer exist or are now no longer relevant. Tillich gives the example of artistic expression before the industrial revolution and I would add that possibly more recent, pre-9/11.
"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."*
Could it be said that throughout history, those unnamed souls who find themselves collectively in such time periods are the ones who carry the torch throughout the darkest moments of man's existence? That those who live their lives in a non-transitional period, live and create in times of unknown/unrealized luxury while those who exist during periods of transition are the unknown/unrealized pillars and light bearers - keepers of the flame - of human existence, both creatively and spiritually?
-Gloria Valentine
*"The Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness" from "The Courage To Be" - Paul Tillich
