On late style

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In the latest issue of Boston Review, Nicholas Delbanco has a deft and thoughtful essay called “Lastingness: How Growing Old Shapes Aesthetic Vision” that ought to be required reading for anyone considering the relationship of creativity and time.

Delbanco, it should be said, is a contributor toThe Times’ book pages; most recently, he’s written for us about Janet Malcolm and Malcolm Lowry. (Hmm, I think I see a through line here.)

In “Lastingness,” he ruminates on the peculiar challenges of the aging artist: to avoid repetition, to maintain stamina and commitment, to persevere. “I can remember,” he writes, “when each morning seemed a burnished, shining thing, when every afternoon and night brought with it the possibility of something or someone not known before. Today there’s very little new beneath the fictive sun.”

And yet, Delbanco continues, “a writer must believe that a tale’s invented incidents are ratified by telling, that made-up characters are worth describing, worth the damning or the saving. ... The name of the shipwrecked is legion, their number beyond counting, yet every once in a great while a storied hero manages to sail between the dangers safely, and the song gets sung.”

David L. Ulin