I have cup that has a quote on it by Franz Kafka.  I bought the cup at the Kafka museum in Prague, a pinkish, stucco affair near the Vltava River where Kafka grew up.  The museum, like the author himself, is dark inside, with byzantine corridors and dimly lit rooms filled with his pictures and letters and work, a place that seems to leap right out of one of his stories.  But it was the quote that struck me and prompted me to buy the cup: I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.  It so captures what Kafka’s life and work were about: an intense concentration on the single passion in his life—writing, composing those brilliant, eccentric little gems of stories, stories that made sense of, and gave purpose to, his life.  He seemed to live for nothing else.  He remained unmarried, worked quietly in an insurance company (like the unappreciated Gregor Samsa; rb.gy/qhgjua), and came home and wrote in the evening, often through the night.  Some would call it the ultimate sacrifice, but Kafka himself viewed his passion not as sacrifice but as life itself. He considered his work as inseparable from his life.  Every time I take a sip of coffee from the cup, I’m reminded of and inspired by his single-minded devotion to his work.

There is a similar and perhaps apocryphal story about another Franz, this one Franz Liszt.  According to the story, after a performance the pianist was confronted by one of his many female admirers.  This woman, it is said, told the great composer that she would give her very life to be able play the way he had.  Liszt replied very matter-of-factly, “Madame, I have.” Or take the fictional character of Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s great novel Dr. Faustus, a man who was willing to trade his very soul to the devil to achieve greatness in his music.  Or Keats who once said in a letter “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”  Or take the hunger artist in Kafka’s own story, someone who literally starves himself for his art, appreciated or not.

There are many such stories of artists and writers suffering for their work. In fact, the anguished artist has become almost a cliché, especially now when few artists or writers need literally to starve themselves for their work anymore.  Still, to make art one is called on to make certain sacrifices.  I have often thought about this question: How much have I been willing to sacrifice for my writing?  I have written for three hours a day for over half a century.  If I add it up–something I’ve never done until this very moment–it comes to roughly 54,000 hours or six years of my life, a number that surprises but hardly troubles me.  Have I missed certain important things—those sunny days playing with my dog, a quiet walk with a friend, a game I wanted to watch, another precious moment of my children’s childhood, a moment even at the time I knew I wouldn’t get back?  Of course.  What writer or artist doesn’t miss those things that were also dear to them?  But I am certain that if I had it to do all over again, I would have spent that time–if not more!–in exactly the same way.  For me writing hasn’t just been a way of spending my time, a mere avocation; it has been and continues to be the very breath and substance of my life.  Like Kafka’s hunger artist, I will continue practicing my art to the very last, unable to do anything more important than writing.  But I can’t say that I wasn’t aware of the profound moments that often competed for my writing time.