Joram turned to writing following a successful career in science. To his surprise, the two have a lot in common. Joram's latest publication is a collection of short stories, Notes Going Underground. Additional publications include The Open Book and Other Tales of Love and Yearning (short stories), Jellyfish Have Eyes (novel), Gene Sharing and Evolution:
The Diversity of Protein Functions (non-fiction), and The Speed of Dark, a Memoir (non-fiction).
Fifty years ago – 50! – Lona and I were married on August 24, 1969, at 2 pm in Washington DC at the Hotel America. We met for the first time on a blind date (no, we both had good vision) on the day of Super Bowl 3, when the underdog New York Jets beat the Baltimore Colts 16 – 7, on January 12, 1969…. I hadn’t even seriously considered proposing until the second date a week or so later. … Coward that I can be at times, it took a couple of months to gather the courage to pop the question….
Probably you, like the rest of us, have told a white lie – a fabricated fork in the truth, such as a false excuse given to wiggle painlessly out of an invitation or request from a friend you would rather not accept. You know it isn’t quite kosher, false, a lie, whatever its color.
Two movies, The Cakemaker and The Farewell, raise the question of whether it is ever ethical to lie, and turn white lies into a complex of colors.
Imagine if Leonardo DaVinci believed he was too old to be creative. Think of the art we would not enjoy; after all, he did’t start the Mona Lisa until he was 62.
In a recent article in The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks talks about his research into the degree of happiness – satisfaction – in successful professionals as they age. Dean Keith Simonton, an expert on trajectories of creative careers, found that productivity increased the first 20 years and started declining thereafter. Started your career at 30? Prepare for decline after 50!
Oh my god, I’m in deep trouble. I continued doing science research until I was 69 and then stepped into a writing career. That wouldn’t be so bad, Brooks says, if I wasn’t too ambitious or expect to be successful anymore. Those days are gone, he says. The creative individuals do their best work in their 30s and 40s.
Does the creative spark really fizzle out?