I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.
I have no choice about whether or not I have Parkinson's. I have nothing but choices about how I react to it. In those choices there's freedom to do a lot of things in areas that I wouldn't have otherwise found myself in.
