{"id":42327,"date":"2022-12-12T03:58:42","date_gmt":"2022-12-11T16:58:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=42327"},"modified":"2022-12-12T03:58:42","modified_gmt":"2022-12-11T16:58:42","slug":"a-year-to-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=42327","title":{"rendered":"A Year to Live"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Anthony<\/p>\n

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Anthony Burgess was forty when he learned he had a brain tumor that would kill him within a year. He had no money at the time and nothing to bequeath to his soon-to-be widow, Lynne.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Burgess had never been a professional novelist in the past; but he was always aware that he had the talent to be a writer in him. So, just to be able to leave at least the copyrights to his wife, he put a piece of paper in the typewriter and began to write his first novel. It was not even certain that what he had written could be published; but he couldn\u2019t think of anything else to do.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cIt was January 1960,\u201d he said, \u201cand according to the diagnosis, I had a winter, a spring, and a summer ahead of me. That year, when the leaves began to fall, I would have died too.\u201d With that speed and haste, Burgess had managed to write five and a half novels before the year was out. E. M. Forster could only write so many in almost an entire lifetime; J. D. Salinger, one of America\u2019s greatest writers, managed to write only half of it in his entire life.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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However, Burgess did not die. His cancer first regressed; then it disappeared altogether. In his long and full life as a writer, he produced more than seventy works, most famously A Clockwork Orange. He might not have written even one of these novels had it not been for the death sentence that cancer had inflicted on him.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Most of us are like Anthony Burgess; we hide a great talent waiting for an emergency to emerge from within us.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A useful exercise in self-motivation is to ask yourself what you would do if you were in Anthony Burgess\u2019s place and found out that you would die of cancer within a year\u2026 \u201cWhat would change in my life, how would I live my last year if I had learned that I would only live one more year? ? What exactly would I do? Considering the brevity of life is a useful exercise; it often brings up surprising thoughts in your mind that will reveal your unused talents that have not yet surfaced.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Burgess was forty when he learned he had a brain tumor that would kill him within a year. He had no money at the time and nothing to bequeath to his soon-to-be widow, Lynne. Burgess had never been a professional novelist in the past; but he was always aware that he had the talent … <\/p>\n

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