Annie Dillard's The Writing Life
I went on a little reading splurge last night. It was the only way I could keep from gettering jittery before the thoroughly disappointing baseball game. In any event, I picked up a few books (see my sidebar for links to Saul Bellow's Collected Stories, David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Annie Dillard's The Writing Life). I started out with Annie Dillard's incredible essay, The Writing Life. Let me share this quote on writing with you:
Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time's scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life's strength: that page will teach you to write.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, at 58-59 (1989).
Wallace ruined watching TV for me with that essay in Fun Things.
But, the Cruise story is greatness.
[edited to eliminate html problem - TPB]
Posted by: Chris | Monday, October 20, 2003 at 05:53 PM
[I took care of the closed brackets] The cruise story is hysterical. I love how Wallace explains that he wants to go chumming for sharks over dinner.
Posted by: TPB, Esq. | Tuesday, October 21, 2003 at 11:54 AM
Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one of my all-time favorites. She's a writer's writer, I think.
Posted by: Trey | Tuesday, October 21, 2003 at 04:39 PM
I read "Writing Life" after a posthumous recommendation from Amanda Davis. She was an author who died in a plane crash with her parents earlier this year. The folks over at McSweeneys -- http://www.mcsweeneys.net/davis.html/ -- were incredibly fond of her & published her story "Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons." There are some really beautiful testimonials/eulogies there.
Posted by: benj | Wednesday, October 22, 2003 at 11:19 AM
Dillard's got it right. Great quote.
OT: Have you seen Intolerable Cruelty yet, TPB?
Posted by: Walter | Thursday, October 23, 2003 at 01:38 AM
I haven't seen it yet, Walter, but I'm looking forward to doing so. It definitely seems like it was based on family law's sick sense of humor.
Posted by: TPB, Esq. | Thursday, October 23, 2003 at 01:22 PM