In some sense, this blog began when I first encountered the following passages.

Writing in Sexus, Henry Miller preaches that creation is vital to the self:

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty.1

Speaking with The Paris Review, Joan Didion strips away this romanticism and lays bare writing as a deliberate ambush of the reader’s mind:

INTERVIEWER
You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION
It’s hostile in that you’re trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It’s hostile to try to wrench around someone else’s mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.2

Here I will indulge the impulse and risk the imposition. And so, my dreams, nightmares, and mere truths—for your consideration.

Notes

  1. Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion, Book 1 (Olympia Press, 2004), 11. ↩︎

  2. Joan Didion, interview by Linda Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction No. 71,” The Paris Review, no. 74 (Fall–Winter 1978), https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion. ↩︎