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Zadie Smith & Nabokov thought that unrequited love was part of
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----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=422889
News
Turning points
In the course of a human life, there may come a point after which nothing is the same again. For some, it is a momentous historical event; for others, a more personal epiphany. Here, public figures reveal what shook their world. Introduction by John Walsh
09 July 2003
For Yoko Ono, it was the voices of kamikaze pilots saying goodbye to their parents. For Archbishop Tutu, it was the sight of a white priest doffing his biretta to a black domestic. For Sheikh Yamani, it was the threat of imminent execution by Carlos the Jackal... From the day when Saul, on the road to Damascus, saw in a flash of light where his energies should henceforth be committed, human beings have been able to point to moments in their life when things fell into place, when the world revealed itself in all its beauty or cruelty, when their future destiny suddenly became apparent.
James Joyce called such moments "epiphanies" - from the religious festival celebrating the "showing forth" of Christ to the Magi - and went into raptures about "sudden spiritual manifestations" that bring the humblest things into a new focus. Richard Gere's defining moment is a magical epiphany - of seeing his newborn son not as a baby, but as an old friend. For playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker, the key moments of their lives involved having plays accepted - as if their own children were being legitimised or authenticated by some higher power. For others, the sudden presence of death makes them reassess their priorities - having 30 minutes to write your will with a gun pointed at your head (to paraphrase Dr Johnson) concentrates a man's mind wonderfully.
Birth and death bring us the starkest defining moments of all, because there is no place for trivia or circumlocution around the arrival and departure of life. Defining moments stop you in your tracks, root you to the spot and insist that you re-examine everything that you thought was true. Read these voices (which can also be heard on the BBC's The World Today) describing the occasions that shaped their characters, and you'll marvel at the way they range from the personal and sentimental to the epic and historical. The finest epiphanies are a combination of the two - a re-negotiation of the contract between you and the world you're in.
DORIS LESSING, novelist
I was probably about 13 or 14 - a very brash and pert white girl - in a mission down in what is now called Mutare, Zimbabwe. And I was chattering away, chatter chatter, showing off to some men who I now see were probably not as old as I thought they were then. And they listened to all this chatter and then one of them said to me: "You see, you are very young, and I am very old." And this was like a slap across the face. And I know it doesn't sound important but it changed me completely in certain of my attitudes to the blacks. I mean, don't forget I was brought up inside the old Rhodesia. It was the wonderful dignity of the remark and the sense of it, and the way I was very gently put in my place with great humanity and humour. It changed me.
The thing that changed my life was when I was very young and met a boy who I thought was extraordinarily beautiful. The rapture of that, and wanting something I could never have, made me start writing. Nabokov thought that unrequited love was part of what writing was - part of a long chase. Martin Amis told me that the desire of being unwanted is also what writing is about. There's revenge in the mix, but yearning makes you become yourself. You never grow out of being obsessed with beauty, whether it's human, natural or literary. That's the thing that motivates me most - I see something beautiful and I want to get it down.
From 'Defining Moments' on the BBC World Service's 'The World Today', 5.30am-8am (1am-5.30am Radio 4), to 20 July
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