“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
The phrase is probably most famous now for being the only sentence Jack Torrance wrote, over and over again, in Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece, The Shining. The scene when Jack’s wife, Wendy, discovers that this is what her husband has been doing instead of writing his book is (among other things) a perfect expression of the horror of writer’s block, the unfathomably dull sterility of the “play” that a writer engages in—the varied geometric patterns that Jack makes on each page out of the many copies of his chosen phrase, for example—to avoid the deeper horror of work. Play, an intentionally purposeless activity, is supposed to loosen one up, connect one to one’s unconscious, allow for true creativity to emerge that would be cramped by the purposive intentionality of work. And it does. But as every artist knows, there’s a fine line between “I’m not working now because I need to clear my head” and “I’m not working now because I’m afraid”—of facing the blank page or canvas.
Read Full Article »
