It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Thoughts on creativity

It was a dark and stormy night, like a line out of a two-bit novel, but it was dark out there and the storm was raging, so how else to describe it without being verbose or wordy?

The wind was howling like a coyote in the wilderness.

Or a wolf.

Maybe a mangy sheepdog on the streets.

Could’ve even been a pack of wolves.

Who would really know except for scientists who study that sort of thing, but then could you trust them to tell the truth if they were doing it for the research dollars?

Rain blanketed the ground as rain always does. Rain’s no respecter of ground unless something’s blocking it. Trees and buildings and cars come to mind.

Hail rapped on the tin roof too. Unique sound that, though rain and hail pelting a tin roof makes for a lot of cool sounds, and totally ruins the roof. But it employs a lot of roofers, damage does, that is.

With the wind howling and the rain pommeling the ground and the darkness and storm doing its thing, I was hunkered inside a warm and dark house thinking of how spoiled we were.

Electricity.

We need it for everything. We do very little without it and are lost when the power goes out, you know, like on dark and stormy nights as this night was turning out to be.

The creative geniuses of yesteryear – the composers, authors, artists, and musicians – didn’t have the luxury of electricity, so they had to take up Benjamin Franklin’s adage:

Early to Bed

Early to Rise

Makes a Man

Healthy Wealthy and Wise.

The person who penned this didn’t have electricity or running water.

How could you possibly write or think under candlelight? Perhaps they didn’t work under candlelight at all, and maybe they only worked during the day.

They didn’t have movies or cat videos or amusement parks or Twitter to distract them, all of which, by the way run on electricity. They didn’t have software or word processors. Everything they did was by hand. If they wanted to create and make substantial edits, they’d have to do a complete do-over.

The more famous of these people just created their works and published, and went back to creating over and over again. Many weren’t even rewarded in their lifetimes for their genius, though many did have generous benefactors to keep their large families afloat. Often their wives or their wives’ family helped make the genius’ family ends meet.

Okay. Here it is. The lights are back on now.

More cat videos and car crash compilations.

Whooptido.

So much for creativity.