“In order to write, you clear away the obligations in your life. No visits, no meals outside, no fencing practice, no walks. Now you can work, produce something worthwhile. And, onto the wide gray sheet of the day, your mind projects – nothing.”
I wish I had logged the
number of times someone I interviewed – cop, nurse, musician, plumber – prefaced
his conversation with: “I could write a book . . .” I understand this is not a
thought-out literary aspiration; rather, an endorsement of one’s experience, a declaration
that one’s life has been interesting and worth recounting. Customarily, nothing
gets written. I recall only one exception. I interviewed a professor of
psychology who also worked as a dance instructor. He actually wrote and
self-published a memoir, which I agreed to edit. Often, I wonder how many
people ever read, cover to cover, that little book.
The passage above is an
entry from Jules Renard’s journal dated March 15, 1905. In his commonsensical
way, Renard understood how our will subverts our best intentions, how good we
are at lying to ourselves. How else to get through life? I mean, if I’m willing
to give up fencing practice, shouldn’t I be able to write like Montaigne?
Renard concludes his journal entry:
“I abolished at a stroke
so many things that were important to me: poetry, fencing, fishing, hunting,
swimming. When will I abolish prose? And literature? And life itself?”
[The Renard passages are taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
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