Oh what should I do?
Alas and achoo,
I’m dying of flu.
A study entitled The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young (from this article in The Guardian) says just that. Associate Professor James C Kaufman of California State University researched 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures. Kaufman writes that:
“the image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies.”
You see? I’m doomed. And it gets worse….the article writes that “a poet’s life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist’s life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.”
Here, I am, on my death bed, penning away. Just like Bronte over Wuthering Heights, if one considers it metaphorically, and then extends the metaphor to include a whiny blogger. On the other hand, I might not need to worry about a poet’s shorter life span, judging from the poetry above.
Ah, onward Thursday! Heigh ho!