The news of the death of Josephine Hart was a blast of cold air on an otherwise beautifully warm English summer Friday afternoon. The announcement came in a company-wide e-mail — Lady Saatchi being the wife of one of our founders — popping up in my inbox incongruously alongside the mammoth, on-going "where shall we go for drinks after work?" exchange.
I never met Josephine — we were once, briefly, in the same room: our little glass-walled meeting room on the 3rd floor: I ran in, jabbed a key on a laptop to make it behave itself, then ran out again; she was on the phone in the corner the entire time — but I had hoped to. I'm sure no-one will mind me mentioning that we were in the early stages of planning an app based on her West End Poetry Hour. I had badgered everyone I could find to be allowed to work on it, and was looking forward to the experience. (I secretly hoped to impress by suggesting the app be entitled "These Fragments". I also hoped to be able to argue her into including "The Fire Sermon" in place of "A Game of Chess". She would doubtless have been able to see instantly through my paper-thin knowledge of modernist poetry.)
The article on her passing on the BBC website ends with her quoting a quote by Yeats. The full quote runs, "Art is a social act of a solitary man". I had never heard this before, but I think it perfectly captures the dichotomy present in the process of creation.
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