Cézanne isn't celebrating some rare talent for innovation—he's describing something far more austere and demanding: the capacity to feel your way through the world as though you're encountering it for the first time. This separates the merely skilled from the genuinely inventive, because the latter must resist the deadening comfort of habit, where we see an apple not as a form of volume and light but as "lunch." A painter standing before the same Mont Sainte-Victoire for the hundredth time, or you looking at your child's face across the breakfast table, must somehow arrive at it afresh—awake rather than asleep—and that vigilance is where the real work lives.