The brevity of Henry James

Henry James, an author on whose works I once spent an entire semester's focus, is quoted as having written "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have." I heard these lines for the first time today and looked them up because they had a poignancy to my life which I could not immediately explain. Hardly surprising since they were used as the closing words to a heartfelt television show, but still no less meaningful to me for all of the emotion they were supposed to engender. It seems, however, that the writer chose to stop the quote prematurely as James actually went on to say "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art" and it was with these additional words that the television writer's spell over me was broken. Not because what James said no longer had any meaning to me, but because the addition of all that he had said was so much more meaningful and so much less trite than the abbreviated quote. I was especially taken up with "Our doubt is our passion. And our passion is our task." How true that is for me every day of my life I feel I can barely put into words. I lack confidence, plain and simple. It seems that every moment I am who I am, I am that way due to doubt: Am I good enough? Do I try hard enough? Do I love enough? My life is filled with the pursuit of answers that only continued action can pursue. Like a dog chasing its tail, I can exhaust myself and never accomplish anything, overwhelmed by the passion of chasing down answers that probably don't exist outside of myself and seem incapable of showing themselves inside. And so I work this task in the background of my life, worrying it like I would worry a wound in my mouth; painful to do but so compelling and impossible to resist. I have no answer for it, but I am exhausted, that much is certain. I wish I could find solace in James' words, but I cannot for I know that there is no solace, no peace in who I am. There is only me, my task, and the madness of this art of life and that must be good enough in the end.