On Sickness, Confinement, and Creativity

Reflections on Issac Newton, Cat Stevens, and R.L. Stevenson

In my reflections on what sickness can teach us, I touched on the role of confinement. When we are feeling healthy and energetic, our inclination is to go out and do things and meet people and fill our days with business and activities. When we are confined by sickness, we are forcibly deprived of distractions.

In 1665, 22-year-old Isaac Newton was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge University when Great Plague of London made its way to the small university town. The young Newton fled to his family farm, Woolsthorpe, about sixty miles north. The two years he spent in isolation at home were, by his own account later in life, “in the prime of my age for invention & minded Mathematicks & Philosophy more than at any time since.”

As recounted in a 2020 essay in the New Yorker:

He created major new insights across vital areas of mathematics—what became calculus, the mathematics of change, and analytical geometry. He created new physics as he used his mathematical discoveries to analyze motion through space and time. He performed experiments to measure gravity’s pull, and then began shaping his most famous idea: universal gravitation, the theory that would connect every object in the cosmos to the flight of that famous apple from bough to ground.

The essay’s author vehemently argues it’s a myth that that isolation during the plague years “woke the brilliance in Newton.” I found his concern with this purported myth strange, as neither my high school nor my college physics teacher proposed that isolation “woke Newton’s brilliance.” Instead they taught us that isolation had freed him from the possibility of anything that could have distracted him from his work, such as student taverns and girls in Cambridge or time-wasting arguments about metaphysics and religion with other students. Stuck on his family farm, there was nothing else for him to do but apply himself to developing his observations and ideas.

Just over 300 years later, in the year 1969, the young London musician, Cat Stevens, was diagnosed with tuberculosis and admitted to a King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst, Sussex. During the year he spent in hospital, he wrote forty songs, many of which were published in his subsequent albums.

An especially poignant case of sickness in a creative artist was that of Robert Louis Stevenson. In 2000, the American Journal of Medicine published an intriguing paper, Did Robert Louis Stevenson have hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia? by Guttmacher and Callahan. As the authors note in their Abstract:

Chronic illness played a major role in the life and literary success of Robert Louis Stevenson. However, the exact nature of his chronic illness remains unclear. It is possible that Stevenson had hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (Osler-Rendu-Weber Syndrome). This would explain his chronic respiratory complaints, recurrent episodes of pulmonary hemorrhage, and his death, at age 44 years, of probable cerebral hemorrhage. It would also explain his mother's hitherto unreported but apparent stroke, at age 38 years.

Stevenson wrote about his bouts of fancy while confined to his bed in a poem titled “The Land of Counterpane.”

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

Not ill health, but bad weather confined Stevenson during the conception of his most popular work, Treasure Island. During a beach holiday in Braemer, Scotland in the summer of 1881, he and his wife and stepson were housebound from driving rain for an entire weekend. To entertain his stepson, he drew a map with an X that marked the spot of buried pirate’s treasure. This spawned his idea for an adventure novel that he composed in two month.

After serialization in 1881-1882, the story was published in book form in 1883 and has since been translated into about every written language, has been adapted for cinema multiple times, and was the inspiration of multiple place names, restaurant chains, amusement parks, and the blockbuster Disney series, Pirates of the Caribbean.

The book’s popularity derives from the extraordinary colorfulness of its characters, speech, places, and the mesmerizing fascination of buried treasure stolen from the Spanish who’d stolen it from the Incas. The character names alone are priceless—Billy Bones, Pew, Black Dog, Long John Silver, Captain Flint, Ben Gunn, and Dr. David Livesey, who seems to be the only reasonable adult in the story. Long John Silver is an exceptionally charming and duplicitous psychopath.

In my opinion, the scene in which Black Dog pays an unwelcome visit to Billy Bones may be the most vivid in all of literature.

“Bill,” said the stranger in a voice that I thought he had tried to make bold and big.

The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn so old and sick.

“Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate, Bill, surely,” said the stranger.

The captain made a sort of gasp.

“Black Dog!” said he.

“And who else?” returned the other, getting more at his ease. “Black Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral Benbow inn. Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since I lost them two talons,” holding up his mutilated hand.

To be sure, we can CHOOSE confinement to free ourselves from distractions in order to focus on creative work. We don’t need to be forced into it by illness. However, because we such hyper social creatures, voluntary isolation goes strongly against our nature.

Social isolation can also be extremely debilitating, especially for young people for whom social interaction is a key element of cognitive development.