Reflections of a stormy petrel

Clapton's work is not different from the work of the average untalented person, and the gratitude they deserve for working is the same in both cases. But the averate untalented person has not done, and is not likely to do, anything comparable to what Eric Clapton consistently does. You seem to me wholly incapable of seizing on this obvious difference. It is not even to do with success - David Olney, a greater musician even than Clapton, is almost unknown - but simply with unique, inborn, inexplicable genius. And you do not explain it with mathematics, because genius is not the top end of intelligence. There have been plenty of stupid geniuses (including a man who worked with mathematics, Niels Bohr). Genius simply is untypical, random, a thing apart. And that is what it has in common with existence itself. The fact that you exist is wholly random, and it separates you from a million million hypothetical other people and things that have never existed and never will. When people complain about life, one has to ask: "as compared to what?" There is no term of comparison. Non-existence is simply nothing; by definition, it does not exist. Existence itself is the highest term of comparison for everything that is random, unexpected, wonderful, and not to be explained away.