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Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
Vorige week hadden we een dag vrij en gingen we naar een natuurreservaat hier in de buurt. We zagen een neushoorn en een baby neushoorn, en veel mooie vogels en hoefdieren. Geen giraffen helaas.
Het reservaat waar we wonen is ook erg mooi en bovendien veilig, want geen grote predatoren. We hebben veel bizons hier, en springbokken, blesbokken, impala, zebra's, struisvogels, gemsbokken. En mooie vogels. We hebben een aardwolf gezien en caracals. Ook zien we veel mangoesten en soms stokstaartjes. Een paar keer zagen we een secretary bird. Gisteren zag ik apen (vervet monkeys) rennen, vlakbij.
The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.
And so it is with me, Pat. Although some times I have felt that I held fire in my hands and spread a page with shining—I have never lost the weight of clumsiness, of ignorance, of aching inability.
A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
Well—then the book is done. It has no virtue any more. The writer wants to cry out—"Bring it back! Let me rewrite it or better—Let me burn it. Don't let it out in the unfriendly cold in that condition."
I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?
But just in the last few months, I’ve insidiously started, because of professional obligations, to become busy. For the first time I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. Except that I hate actually being busy. Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve. It got more and more intolerable until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again.
When you lose interest in something, you must always consider the possibility that you’ve gotten what you came for; you have completed your mission. That’s why you lose interest: not because you’re flawed or lazy or unable to focus, but because you’re finished.
If you nourished your sexual life with all the excitements and adventures which love injects into sensuality, you would be the most potent man in the world. The source of sexual power is curiosity, passion. You are watching its little flame die of asphyxiation. Sex does not thrive on monotony. Without feeling, inventions, moods, no surprises in bed. Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all of the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
"Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do."
It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
We lay on your red carpet after we drank too much and by morning the fabric would surely hold the smell of cheap cigarettes, but you wouldn’t worry about that now, maybe later, now all you needed was to lay still with me and look through the window and wonder
why?
And I said: what, why? Why do you need to know? What does it matter?
We’ve grown up being told we need a reason for everything, that there’s a meaning behind every single thing and if only you figure out what it is, you’ll succeed, you’ll have made it. Wake up, make your bed, get out, be nice, work hard, eat well, be nicer, work harder, read good books, say your prayers, go to sleep, have peaceful dreams. Repeat.
But it’s not for us, darling, it never was. I don’t believe in a higher meaning, nor do I need a purpose to live for. I believe in us, in life, in the magical reality of everything around us. Look at it, then look again, look harder because I can’t make you see until you want to. This is it. This is all there is to it, and it’s wonderful enough as it is. I don’t believe in god or praying. I don’t believe in heaven or hell. There’s no afterlife I’m hoping for, no deadline I’m dreading. I don’t need to know what we’re put on earth for - I don’t believe we were put on earth to begin with. We became and here we are.
