First Person Arts

The world’s a-frenzy as the pool gives way to the track at the Beijing Olympics. Maybe that’s what drew my attention to the Telegraph’s review of novelist Haruki Murakami’s new memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running has a satisfyingly elliptical structure. Its central strand concerns Murakami’s preparations for the 2005 New York City Marathon. Around this he weaves accounts of earlier races - marathons, ultramarathons and triathlons - as well as the story of his beginnings as a novelist and runner.

From his epiphany at a baseball game on April Fool’s Day 1978 - ‘the crack of bat meeting ball right on the sweet spot echoed through the stadium… And it was at that exact moment that a thought struck me: You know what? I could try writing a novel’ - there is a movement between everyday, prosaic detail and more philosophical possibilities.

By turns, running is presented as simply a means of combating the newly sedentary novelist’s tendency to put on weight, and as a kind of healthful yang to the decadent yin of the writerly imagination.

Ultimately, he suggests, it provides the physical and mental stamina necessary to sustain life as a creative artist over the span of a lengthy career. Running becomes both a metaphor for the focus and endurance needed by the writer and a means by which they can be achieved.

Read the rest here.  What are you doing to “sustain life as a creative artist”?