har-ish

I have often wondered what it must be like when a creative urge takes hold of you so completely that you begin to pursue it to the exclusion of almost everything else in the world.
That thought came back to me while watching The Moon and the Sixpence, based on Somerset Maugham’s novel that I had liked immensely. Maugham’s Charles Strickland, loosely inspired by Paul Gauguin, is consumed by an inexplicable need to paint. He gives up comfort, convention, relationships and respectability not because he has carefully chosen a different life, but because something within him seems to leave him no other choice.
There is something both exhilarating and unsettling about that idea. What if the thing you are meant to create becomes more compelling than the life you are expected to live?
I don’t pretend to understand that kind of obsession. But watching the film stirred something in me. I found myself picking up a pen and drawing without really knowing what I was trying to make. I simply wanted to follow the impulse and see where it went.
Perhaps that is what I liked most about Maugham’s novel. It doesn’t merely make you think about Gauguin or about art. It makes you wonder what might happen if, just once, you stopped asking where the impulse came from and simply followed it.