Passion is the overpowering, inescapable fate of all artists, who must learn at great costs and pain not to control it — for control is impossible — but to ride it so that it will not destroy them. This mysterious, dangerous struggle is at the center of all art that hopes to penetrate the surface of its medium, and it was this process that Henry James, the sanest of writers, described with ardent candor in The Middle Years:

"We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

-- from "Connect the Prose and the Passion" by Dana Goia. Read whole essay here.