Why do I only study the dead masters, never the living?

You have read the letters of the dead until you know their handwriting better than your own. You can trace a master's hesitation in a brushstroke centuries old. But ask you to name three people working in your field today, still breathing, still failing in public — and something in you goes quiet. This is not really about history. The dead cannot embarrass you. They cannot post something mediocre next week. They finished being uncertain long ago, and their uncertainty has hardened into legend, which is easier to love than a living person's unfinished, uneven work. The living tradition is happening without you watching it. Somewhere a contemporary of yours is failing at exactly the thing you fear failing at — and you have not let yourself see it, because seeing it would mean you are in the room with them, not above them, not after them.