The Passion of Creation

by Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945)

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The Passion of Creation, by Leonid Pasternak (early 1900s)

Why do we create? Walter Benjamin had an interesting theory about this. He said that what motivates good writers is that they write the kind of books they wished they could buy at the bookstore. As he put it: “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

In the painting above, titled “The Passion of Creation”, by Leonid Pasternak we see a writer in the act of creation. His eyes are closed, as if he’s searching for the right words. As Kurt Vonnegut once observed, to be a writer is to throw yourself off a cliff and hope you grow wings.

It’s a depiction of what you might call the creative process. Traditionally artists had depicted intellectual work as a kind of status symbol. Their patrons wanted to be portrayed as learned men, surrounded by books that almost nobody else could understand or even read.

Consider, for example, the portrait below, by François de Troy.

See how he’s smugly pointing to the text? It’s as if he’s saying, “these are the kinds of books I read.” He wants to be considered an intellectual, not a creative.

Against this type of portraiture, Pasternak depicted artists and writers struggling to create. It’s an enormous leap forward, because it shows us a key truth about humanity: to create is to struggle, but to struggle is to be alive. Pasternak’s painting suggests that creativity means choosing to struggle voluntarily every day, and that this can be a wonderful way to live.

As Benjamin once joked, perhaps the best way to acquire new books is to write them yourself. And yet there’s a deeper meaning to the quip. In choosing to create, we also choose to acquire a purpose. Which is to say, the passion of creation gives us a way to live, and -for some- a reason to keep on living. And this, to my mind, is what “The Passion of Creation” is all about. It is a hopeful, truthful painting, showing us what might be called “the life of the mind”. In other words, a writer’s life.

It is very beautiful indeed.

Julian