ON WRITING
WRITERS DO SOME OF THEIR BEST WRITING WHEN WRITING ABOUT THAT VERY SUBJECT. PERHAPS, THIS SHOULD NOT BE A SURPRISE. WE LOVE IT SO.
The following is taken from Maria Popova’s quite remarkable www.brainpickings.org web site. I know of no other person than Maria Popova who both understands and communicates the essence of creativity so well. The woman is downright uncanny. I am an unabashed admirer.
"Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer," the magnificent Zadie Smith told the audience at the 15th annual New Yorker Festival on a late Friday night, echoing Susan Sontag's assertion that fruitful writing is born out of fruitful reading, out of a "book-drunken life." This osmotic relationship between reading and writing has been extolled in forms as piercingly poetic as Kafka's letter on the purpose of books and as scientifically grounded as the work of Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker, but hardly anyone has expressed it more lyrically and with more shimmering aliveness than another of our era's greatest essayists,Rebecca Solnit, in The Faraway Nearby(public library) – the equally, if differently, rewarding follow-up to her spectacular essay collection A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
In the fourth of the book's thirteen extraordinary essays, titled "Flight," Solnit writes:
“Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
“Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?”
511 words
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