Tipping point

He was standing in the shower one morning when that scene of the writer occurred to him: the writer, sitting at a desk in czarist Russia, opining that it was impossible to write well unless one were truly hungry. And he realized, standing in the shower, that every time he had gotten to that critical point as an artist, that pivotal point between hobby and livelihood, a little voice in the back of his head had recalled that scene and sent a message through his subconscious: you'll never be any good because you are too well-fed. He didn't know which was more maddening, that his whole adult life hung on the thread of a scene from a Dostoevsky novel, or that, as it now dawned on him, all these years he may have taken the use of hunger too literally.

Whatever. It was too late now. He buried the thought as he hurried through the rest of his morning, shuffling the kids out the door and tucking his Wall Street Journal under his arm as he raced to catch his train.