By Esther Kim “Death is the mother of beauty,” the American poet Wallace Stevens writes in “Sunday Morning,” his lengthy, philosophical poem about paradise. His point confused me as a 20-year-old college student. Wasn’t a deathless heaven what everyone pined after? Our professor, Frank Bidart, explained the meaning of that troubling line, which I paraphrase: Stevens meant mortality makes life and art beautiful.
In a place without death then, is there no beauty? I believe in a corollary. Boredom is the mother of creativity. Because boredom means time.
And time in this life — to create, to think — is a luxury, a privilege. This occurred to me during "the Crash." I needed to get moving on a book project, so I decided this summer to attempt to copy author Kazuo Ishiguro’s creative process, which he and his wife carved out together and he describes in great detail for the British newspaper The Guardian.
The Crash is how Ishiguro wrote "Remains of the Day" — a brilliant, restrained novel about an English butler’s heartbreaking, misguided loyalty to his lordly employer — in four weeks. Back in the summer of 1987, Ishiguro cleared his diary. With the agreement of his wife, Lorna, who took over his household chores for one month, he wrote every day from 9:30 a.
m. to 10 p.m.
Ishiguro took an hour off for lunch and two hours for dinner. He did not see, let alone answer, any mail or go near the phone. (Today, I suppose you must avoid email, text messages, Kakao mess.