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Complex Numbers #1051820 added June 29, 2023 at 9:27am
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Occupational Hazards
The headline from today's article sounds like something Cracked would tackle, but no, it's LitHub.
You'd think that out of all possible professions, writing would be among the least prone to occupational hazard. Maybe the occasional carpal tunnel, but that's about it, right? Well, you'd be right, but as this article shows, nothing is perfectly safe.
Even the toughest of poets and strongest of Hemingways would have to admit that “writer” is not a particularly dangerous job. (Unlike, say, fisherman, miner, logger, knife-thrower assistant.)
This, of course, depends on the kind of writer you are. Novelist who sits at home and relies on Wikipedia for research? Sure. War correspondent? Not so much.
Still, a few writers in history have actually suffered some serious health problems as a result of their writing practice—or in some cases, the drugs they used to fuel it.
Yeah, drugs probably shouldn't count. Those aren't specific to the writing profession.
As I noted above, this isn't Cracked, so no numbered list, countdown or otherwise.
Orwell struggled with health problems from childhood, and things were not improved when he was shot in the neck in Spain. But as Ross writes at PW, “his health collapsed for the first time after the writing of Homage to Catalonia, and the heroic effort of writing and revising Nineteen Eighty-Four would kill him.”
Or was it the government trying to suppress his work?
Over at Poets & Writers, Anelise Chen notes that Herman Melville “dove with such intensity into his whale book that his entire family circulated letters conspiring to make him rest. Ignoring their pleas, he emerged from Moby-Dick plagued with eye spasms, anxiety attacks, and debilitating back pain.”
What a coincidence. Those things happen when you try to read it, too.
The nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi...
Who?
...whom Adam Kirsh has dubbed “the supreme poet of passive, helpless suffering,”...
Clearly, Kirsh didn't know Leonard Cohen.
...may have turned out that way because he from debilitating scoliosis, which gave him a hump and turned him into, as he put it, “a walking sepulcher.” He blamed his condition on his “scholarly excesses”
Nah, it was all the sex he got from being a poet.
Honoré de Balzac was famously addicted to coffee, which he loved for what it did for his writing.
Take heed, fellow WDC authors.
Neither did it go perfectly well for Balzac himself, who reportedly died of caffeine poisoning at the age of 51.
Fuck me, caffeine poisoning is a thing?
Objectivist Ayn Rand also had an addiction that sprang from her writing process: amphetamines.
Unfortunately for the world, they didn't cause her early demise.
If you’re familiar with his work, it isn’t particularly surprising to find out that Franz Kafka put himself through emotional and physical hell to get his writing done.
What? That's absurd.
His throat closed up, precluding the ingestion of any food, and so he technically died of starvation, working on his story “The Hunger Artist” to the very last.
Thus was the modern definition of irony born. |
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