[GuestPost] Creation, grief, guilt, and love

Emeritus Kat and Mrs. Kat
1976

Long time Kat readers will remember fondly Emeritus Kat, Neil Wilkof's, dispatches from the world of IP, licensing, politics and culture for almost 15 years.  In memory of his beloved late wife, Neil has returned to the blog to publish a post which has at its heart a topic we seldom discuss in IP - that of loss, love and intellectual creation.  

Over to Neil:

"Guilt and love and guilt do not usually feature in a discussion about intellectual creation. But for this Emeritus Kat, they have come to the fore in the space where his grief meets catharsis.

Kat readers may recall that I contributed to IPKat for nearly 15 years. Throughout, I was grateful for the encouragement of Kat readers. They may also recall that, from time to time, my contributions would benefit from the wisdom of my wife, Leah, to whom I would refer in blog posts as Mrs. Kat. In late January, Mrs. Kat succumbed to the ravages of cancer. It was only a matter of months from diagnosis to chemotherapy to her death. Animated by the love of over 50 years, caregiving becomes a full- time enterprise; any felt need for intellectual creation was cast to the side. Except that this was not exactly true.

Several years ago, I was given the opportunity to author a book that explores intellectual property from an unconventional perspective. Having retired from day-to-day legal practice, I had abundant time to devote to the project, experiencing a creative satisfaction rarely felt previously . Before then, writing had provided a welcome creative outlet to complement my day job as an IP lawyer. But this last project was different, it did not merely complement but allowed me an unfiltered sense of unconditional satisfaction. But it was more than 'satisfaction'. As I would tell Mrs. Kat, it was an act of creative love.

And so, I burrowed down in the act of writing, three to five hours a day, day after day, for nearly two years, I was lodged in my study, Mrs. Kat in the salon when she was not up and about. Writing is by its nature a solitary affair, a form of opportunity cost when the foregone alternative is social interaction, be it personal or collective. As always, Mrs. Kat fully allowed me this creative isolation.

St. Jerome in his Study
 by Albrecht Dürer

But throughout, gnawing on my conscious was the book, Out of Time, by Lynne Segal. There, the author presents a challenging account of what she describes as the pleasures and perils of aging. Pleasure was the opportunity for me to work on the manuscript, but the flip side was the peril—would illness or death intervene? Finally, I was reaching completion of the manuscript, which meant that all that was left to do was reread the entire text one last time, to clean it up, as it were.

That was mid-July 2025. And then Mrs. Kat, up to then, a strong, active, engaged woman, first entered the hospital for an extended period, followed by the diagnosis that we realized would sooner or later seal her fate. Still, as caregiver, my days were occupied with what I could to ameliorate her situation, hope against hope that the disease would somehow arrest itself. Ultimately, that was not to be. The act of rereading the manuscript extended over many months as I stole an hour late at night or early in the morning, all the while caring for Mrs. Kat.

It was here that the Segal's warning about the heightened contingency of time for the elderly became combined with a sense of guilt. I had engaged those hundreds of hours in solitary creation, Mrs. Kat being only several meters (and one closed door) away. I had chosen to prefer my satisfaction to sharing that time with her. Someone who had devoted decades to worshipping the value of intellectual creation was challenged by the possibility that in so chasing that muse, he had forgone the spiritual intimacy of couplehood. I became consumed by guilt: guilt, guilt, guilty, guilty.

Until I came to realize that what I experienced was a clash of competing senses of love, the love of partnership and that of written creation, surely not equal but each capable of evoking profound emotions. Mrs. Kat, the best thing that ever happened to me over fifty years of marriage, and the act of intellectual creation, short-term to be sure, but for its duration, a source of unmediated joy.

I found my consolation in the novel, Stoner, by John Williams, an underappreciated classic of American literature from the 1960's. It tells the story of William Stoner, who left the family farm in Missouri to become an undistinguished professor of English literature. As the Introduction by John McGahern makes clear, the "central idea" of the novel is "surely that of love, the many forms love takes and all the forces that oppose it."

On the one hand, the novel recites Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare, his quintessential rumination on growing old---

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shortly thereafter, the novel describes Stoner's conversion experience from following a course of study in agriculture (upon which he was to return to the family farm) to an embrace of the spiritual intensity that literature can offer. As narrator tells us--

"Tristan, Iseult the fair, walked before him; Paolo and Francesca whirled in the glowing dark; Helen and bright Paris, their faces bitter with consequence, rose from the gloom. And he was with them in a way that he could never be with his fellows who went from class to class…."

Tristan and Iseult, a medieval legend of the tragedy of love that gave form to various literary accounts culminating in Wagner's opera; Paolo and Francesca, ill-fated, adulterous lovers from Dante's Inferno; and Helen and Paris, the relationship that Homer describes as leading to the Trojan War. While I am light years away from the tragic consequences that love can engender, still my passion for written creation led me to ask Mrs. Kat to allow me to engage in my solitary passion, this at the expense of couplehood. I loved the solitary, but I loved Mrs. Kat infinitely more.

No guilt here: love can indeed take many forms."