A passage from the Saunterer’s book, The Life of the Creative Spirit (p. 59):
A leading example of the extent to which will power can help accomplish matters is W. N. P. Barbellion. Barbellion was a cogged locomotive. Born under a sentence of impending death, his heart dropped beats, throwing him into faints, and his doctor doubted he would see his thirtieth birthday (he didn’t).
Scattered through Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man are his angry complaints to God about being cheated of time to create consequential works. But cheated or not, he refused to capitulate. Into his foreshortened years he ordered himself to squeeze progress that would count. On almost nothing but resolve he raced his life’s work against his body’s deadline, to accomplish in zoology and in writing what we are unaccustomed to seeing from those granted twice and longer his time.
A sample from Barbellion’s journal:
Youth is an intoxication without wine, some one says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great thing is to live, to clutch at our existence and race away with it in some great and enthralling pursuit. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 169.)
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For a brief biography of W. N. P. Barbellion (pen name of Bruce Frederick Cummings), click here.
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