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After Conrad failed to kill himself by firing a gun into his chest in a dingy apartment in Marseille he moved to Lowestoft and worked on boats shipping coal.
When Novalis’ 15-year old fiancee Sophie died he moved to Freiburg and ran a Salt Mine.
Only after seeing Caspar David Freidrich’s painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog did Schinkel admit that he would never attain such mastery of painting and turn to architecture.
It took Murakami seeing someone hit a home run to prompt his literary career. With Kiekegaard it was a broken marital engagement. Solitary Confinement for Mayakovsky.
Robert Barker invented the panoramic painting only after studying how light dropped through the barred windows of his cell in debtor’s prison.
Borges knocked his head against a recently painted casement window that somebody had forgotten to close on Christmas Eve, 1938. Only after this serious head wound did he begin to write experimental fiction.
Daniel Defoe’s listed occupation on the occasion of publishing his first written piece - operator of a tile and brick factory in Tilbury. Shklovsky was an army mechanic. Gaugain a stock-brocker.
It goes without saying that Carlos Williams was a doctor. Like Chekhov. And Somerset Maughan.
John Martin was apprenticed to a coach-builder before a financial quarrel saw him train as a painter.
Borges wrote over 20 books after he lost his sight. Beethoven composed the fifth symphony whilst deaf. Throughout his entire life Walter Gropius could not draw. Maybe this accounts for the straight lines of Bauhaus.
David Markson made a career writing trashy detective novels until he published the erudite, digressive, anecdotal Wittgenstein’s Mistress aged 61.
Plot, progression, linearity. Follow the hand of a clock as if it were the needle of a compass.
