I think I know the moment I wanted to be a poet. It was at the moment when Yuri Zhivago got up in the middle of the night, lit a candle, and reached in a desk drawer and pulled out clean, un-ruled paper and a fountain pen. The moment was in black and white except for the tip of the candle flame’s tints of yellow. The room was black as was the overcoat pulled over his shoulders because of the cold; the windows were white with ice crystals that seemed a reflection of the white lace curtains. The paper was white, the ink black. Yuri looked into the ice crystals, then deeper into them as if he were looking deep into one of his microscopes in the medical lab. He drifted away for a moment, then back and looked at the paper and wrote Lara.
It was the beginning of his greatest work, the Lara Poems.
That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to rise in the middle of the night driven by inspiration, surrender to the muse, and write poems by candlelight.
Seeing Yuri do that made me consider that’s what I wanted to do.
The music convinced me.
The music that started faintly as he woke and then rose as he did and accentuated each point of each ice crystal and reached its crescendo as Yuri wrote the first few lines was what really did it for me. It was the music that fueled the passion of the moment I felt as an eleven-year-old.
I knew then I wanted my life to have a soundtrack like that which Maurice Jarre could give me.
Dr. Zhivago opening titles