The secret of boring people,” Chekhov said, “lies in telling them everything.
Show your cock,” she says, and dies again.
The Russians, when I found them a few years later, worked on me in the same way. They seemed to regard fiction not as something decorative but as a vital moral-ethical tool. They changed you when you read them, made the world seem to be telling a different, more interesting story, a story in which you might play a meaningful part, and in which you had responsibilities.
That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.
Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen.
It’s hard to get any beauty at all into a story. If and when we do, it might not be the type of beauty we’ve always dreamed of making. But we have to take whatever beauty we can get, however we can get it.
There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see.
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously – as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.
Every human position has a problem with it. Believed in too much, it slides into error. It’s not that no position is correct; it’s that no position is correct for long. We’re perpetually slipping out of absolute virtue and failing to notice, blinded by our desire to settle in – to finally stop fretting about things and relax forever and just be correct; to find an agenda and stick with it.
And that, by extrapolation, every person in the world has his or her inner orchestra, and the instruments present in their orchestras are, roughly speaking, the same as the ones in ours. And this is why literature works.
These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.
No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.
Soon it becomes clear that we are not, after all, in control, not a high-functioning sailor standing stably on a nice calm deck, a deck that we have created through our virtue. The ship is pitching, and the deck is covered in ice, and we’re wearing special headphones that distort what our crewmates are shouting and special mouthpieces that distort what we’re shouting back in return.
I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we’ll turn out to be.
It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s more, too – it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.
In my view, all art begins in that instant of intuitive preference.
We might imagine a story as a room-sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.
Reconsideration is hard; it takes courage. We have to deny ourselves the comfort of always being the same person, one who arrived at an answer some time ago and has never had any reason to doubt it.
How can Janet know she’s not being her best self if someone doesn’t tell her, then right away afterwards harshly discipline her?