I love those goosebump moments of recognizing kindred spirits. In the best cases, this happens in person, but very often it happens with individuals I come to know more distantly – through their writing, artwork or music or through stories someone else shares about them.

Over the past year or so, as my creative work has shifted from visual art to writing, this has happened more often with writers, and I have learned that when I sit down to read, I must always have a pen at hand to mark passages, quotes and excerpts that tug at my soul. I’ve recently marked pages in The Art of the Personal Essay, The New Yorker, Plant Dreaming Deep and Sun magazine. I’ve nodded my head and folded small corners, always feeling a unique combination of relief and joy that I am not alone with certain thoughts, ideals and longings.

My latest experience of falling in love with someone I will never meet happened when I read an article in The New Yorker about the tragically brief life of writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was a Polish Jewish writer born in 1892 and killed during the holocaust in 1942. I had never heard of Schulz before reading this article, but his book The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories now sits on my desk, having just arrived in the mail not five minutes ago, having been ordered on Amazon.com not five minutes after I finished reading the article about him.

The author of The New Yorker article was David Grossman, a writer himself, and it was this passage of his article that made me wish I could reach through history and hold Schulz’s hand, if only for a moment:

“The Age of Genius was for Schulz an age driven by the faith that life could be created over and over again through the power of imagination and passion and love, the faith that despair had not yet overruled any of these forces, that we had not yet been eaten away by our own cynicism and nihilism. The Age of Genius was for Schulz a period of perfect childhood, feral and filled with light, which even if it lasted for only a brief moment in a person’s life would be missed for the rest of his years.”

It is hard for me to comprehend how a writer with such beautiful, thought-provoking dreams and ideas could be taken from this world as brutally and inhumanely as he was. Then again, this has been the fate of many a writer, artist and philosopher, from Franco’s victims in 1940s Spain and all those who disappeared during Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1980s. Writers and artists tend to be outspoken free thinkers, and have been targeted throughout history by regimes wanting to dictate every thought and action of their constituents. Schulz was targeted because of his religion rather than his vocation, but the result was the same: The world lost a great artist, as it has lost many artists at the hand of those whose goal is antithetical to every artist’s deepest mission: The goal of annihilation — of ideas, of beauty, of life.

Much has been said of the importance of the work artists and writers do, how our unique interpretation and expression of all that exists in the world — from birth and trees to war and water — is necessary for humanity to continue evolving, and I have written much about my emphasis on sharing work that is positive and inspiring. Even with a piece of writing such as this one, which discusses murderous dictators and the creative lives cut short at their hands, my underlying goal is to offer a spark of hope — a ray of light that can shine on “the power of imagination and passion and love” that Schulz so fervently wanted all of humanity to be able to capture and create.

There are sad stories in this piece of writing, but in their midst lies hope and encouragement for all of us to create beauty, write stories and sing songs, particularly those of us in the United States, where we are free to pretty much do as we please. We need to draw, write, sing and dance because we can, because so many cannot and so many will never be able to; we need to put our mark in the world in whatever way enables us to vibrate along that frequency where passion is pure and our voices are strongest, where Schulz still lives and breathes and whispers his words, where the bullet that took his life away is nothing but an illusion.

4 Responses to “The age of genius”

1. Grace Moore Says:
   July 17th, 2009 at 11:18 am

   Thank you, Christine.
   Grace

2. merci Says:
   July 17th, 2009 at 2:24 pm

   as ever, your writing is just as inspirational as your art.

3. Ashwathy Nair Says:
   July 18th, 2009 at 12:33 pm

   Beautifully written!

4. Kolleen Harrison Says:
   July 18th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

   Christine,

   Once again I am taken aback by your writing. You truly know how to use your gift and our world is a better place because of that. Thank you for this beautiful and touching article. I will be sure to grab the book sitting on your desk written by the amazing soul and genius better known as Bruno Schulz. Thank you for brining this writing into the light for me. Blessings upon you!

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