Here is Murr, my cat who died about 5 years ago, caught in the act of writing a book. He was with me for 21 years, a large part of my life. He was an intelligent cat and a good companion. It's a commonplace that creative people prefer the company of cats to dogs. Cats allow you to concentrate on work. Usually. My current cat, Leonardo, is good company too, but he doesn't quite measure up to Murr yet. Leo is more demanding and Murr could keep you company while leaving you to do your thing. You could also say that Murr had lastingness, an intelligent and active kitty to the end. He was the equivalent of 118 years old.
I've recently read two books, Solitude by Anthony Storrs and Lastingness by Nicholas Delbanco. They had been on my to-read-some-day list for some time, but I did not know that one would speak to the other and quote it so much. They both deal with the life of creative people.
Solitude investigates the need of some people for a way of life that most people today find puzzling and unattractive, and even judge it to be an unacceptable choice even for others, that is the inclination to be alone, to read, to think, to create, to make things or solve problems. We live in a society that more and more values the outgoing charming personality and team activities over the introspective and solitary person. Storrs inspects the lives of many famous creative people in history who would fall in that latter category. He thinks the prejudice against such people may waste much of human potential. You can see it in action when the college scholarships all go to those who can command leadership roles and win elections in the personality contests of political positions. Emily Dickenson and even Albert Einstein would lose out in this competition.
The other book, Lastingness: the Art of Old Age, was about the question of creativity in old age. The common wisdom is that new ideas and innovation in the arts and science are the work of the young. We cease to create in mid life. This is also just a cultural prejudice. The many examples he explores can be inspirational, which is why I had it on my list. I'm going to need to live to 100 and keep working to get all the work I have begun finished. I need all the inspiration I can get. He also looks at the opposite situation, at some who lost it in later life but kept working anyway, like the poet Holderlin. His life may have been better for his continuing to write poems, but the poems were terrible. Still the numbers of great thinkers and creators whose work only got better and better are sufficient to blow away the false conclusion that decline is inevitable.
I am encouraged also by the example of Frank Lloyd Wright (my first hero--I told my mother when I was 4 that I was going to study architecture with him at Taliesen West, but he died the next year). He was retired early after the scandals of his personal life, but returned to work at 55. If he hadn't, he would only have designed some nice houses. All his most famous and grander work was done after the age of 55. And Hokusai is even more amazing. In his notebooks he wrote that he drew obsessively since the age of 6, but nothing he did before the age of 70 was worth much. And it's true -- his famous work was all done after the age of 70, including the Great Wave Off Kanagawa. There is maybe time yet.
