Creativity needs a season of despair
The Longest Nights
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
In early winter, when the heavy rains come to the Pacific Northwest and we settle under a blanket of sullen sky, something stirs in the creative soul. At the calendar's gloaming, while the landscape is inert, and all is dark, sluggish, bleak and cold, writers and cooks and artists and tinkerers of all sorts are at their most productive.
At least, that's my theory. As a lifelong resident of a latitude well to the north of Maine, I've come to the conclusion that creativity needs a season of despair. Where would William Butler Yeats be if he nested in Tuscany? Could Charles Dickens ever have written a word from South Beach? And the sun of Hollywood did much to bleach the talents out of that troubled native of Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Today, here in Seattle, the sun will set at 4:40 p.m., after making a sketchy appearance of eight hours and 45 minutes. Paris, farther north by 1.2 degrees of latitude, will get even less daylight -- eight hours and 35 minutes. And Dublin, straddling the 53rd parallel, will see seven hours and 56 minutes.
What these cities share, in addition to long winter nights, is a large and active creative class. Countless Americans (and innumerable French artists and writers) have done their best work under la grisaille, as Parisians call their leaden ceiling. Ireland surely has more good writers and dramatists per capita than any country in the world. And in Seattle, you can't walk outside for a snort of espresso without bumping into a newly published novelist who finally finished the tortured tome after escaping from somewhere with too much distracting sun.
(More here.)
By TIMOTHY EGAN, NYT
In early winter, when the heavy rains come to the Pacific Northwest and we settle under a blanket of sullen sky, something stirs in the creative soul. At the calendar's gloaming, while the landscape is inert, and all is dark, sluggish, bleak and cold, writers and cooks and artists and tinkerers of all sorts are at their most productive.
At least, that's my theory. As a lifelong resident of a latitude well to the north of Maine, I've come to the conclusion that creativity needs a season of despair. Where would William Butler Yeats be if he nested in Tuscany? Could Charles Dickens ever have written a word from South Beach? And the sun of Hollywood did much to bleach the talents out of that troubled native of Minnesota, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Today, here in Seattle, the sun will set at 4:40 p.m., after making a sketchy appearance of eight hours and 45 minutes. Paris, farther north by 1.2 degrees of latitude, will get even less daylight -- eight hours and 35 minutes. And Dublin, straddling the 53rd parallel, will see seven hours and 56 minutes.
What these cities share, in addition to long winter nights, is a large and active creative class. Countless Americans (and innumerable French artists and writers) have done their best work under la grisaille, as Parisians call their leaden ceiling. Ireland surely has more good writers and dramatists per capita than any country in the world. And in Seattle, you can't walk outside for a snort of espresso without bumping into a newly published novelist who finally finished the tortured tome after escaping from somewhere with too much distracting sun.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home