in your life was meant to disappear anyway. Maybe that's why they last forever.
At any rate, I don't blame myself for what happened. And I certainly don't blame Clyde P. or Fox H. or even Teddy M. I blame the publisher. I blame the editor. I blame the copy editor and the guy who binds the pages together in some factory in New Jersey. I blame the guy who reads the book on a beach in Hawaii. Or the woman who reads it on the plane bound for a trade convention in Indianapolis. Or the guy who sells flowers in the little shop on the corner. Or the guy who buys the flowers for his wife, who's not really on her way to a trade show in Indianapolis but is busy rubbing suntan lotion on the guy reading the book on the beach in Hawaii. Or the people who aren't doing what they ought to be doing, aren't saying what they ought to be saying, aren't living the way they ought to be living, all because they aren't doing what they're doing with any heart at all. If you're going to blame anyone for what happened, you've pretty well got to blame everyone. In fact, you might as well blame the human spirit for flickering each time and looking like it's going to die just before it comes back to life.
I wasn't blind, of course, and I wasn't deaf. I'd taken some notes and these scribblings tend to come alive late at night when you live in a small basement apartment and you find yourself wondering whether to kill yourself or go bowling and, possibly instead, you decide to write. And you observe things, of course, when you find yourself flying perhaps too close to the souls of beautiful, doomed people who embrace you with an open honesty that almost makes you ashamed. The writer of fiction, it would seem, is sometimes like a small child at a formal occasion and he doesn't truly comprehend if it's a wedding or a funeral and in the end, I suppose, it doesn't really matter because the child will soon learn to see and hear and think like everybody else and maybe someday he'll write it all down and make it disappear.
There is another school of thought, of course, probably the prevailing one, which contends that literature and art do not make things disappear but instead make things last forever. Both schools of thought are correct and both are wrong, just as you or I may be correct or wrong and sometimes a little bit of both at the same time. There is no doubt art can cause the idea, likeness, or interpretation of the subject of that art to endure in the minds of men. It is also true, though there is little empirical evidence to prove it, that the very process itself of transmogrifying the muse into the art may mean that the muse has no more further reason for being. These are not thoughts, however, that a writer should be thinking. Not if he wishes to write.
Actually, I wasn't thinking only of metaphysical matters that night. I was thinking of Clyde P. and Fox H. and hammering furiously on my Smith Corona electric typewriter when something happened that gave me quite a turn. I saw a face at the window. When you live in a basement apartment, you realize this may come with the territory but at one o'clock in the morning it can still be a rather frightening event. Someone had not only been watching me write, I had the distinct and highly disturbing feeling that someone, indeed, had been watching me think.
I walked cautiously to the window, acutely aware that I was backlit perfectly for some rambling psycho to blow me away for no rational reason. For no rational reason, I felt a twinge of guilt about the fact that I'd just been engaged in the process of transforming my two new friends into little black etchings in my war against the blank white page. Why did I not view writing about them as a tribute to them? Why did I feel I was somehow using them, changing them forever from people to characters? And what was a character, anyway? It was people, only more so. And I had been doing nothing wrong-only practicing my desperate art, which had been rusting away for
At any rate, I don't blame myself for what happened. And I certainly don't blame Clyde P. or Fox H. or even Teddy M. I blame the publisher. I blame the editor. I blame the copy editor and the guy who binds the pages together in some factory in New Jersey. I blame the guy who reads the book on a beach in Hawaii. Or the woman who reads it on the plane bound for a trade convention in Indianapolis. Or the guy who sells flowers in the little shop on the corner. Or the guy who buys the flowers for his wife, who's not really on her way to a trade show in Indianapolis but is busy rubbing suntan lotion on the guy reading the book on the beach in Hawaii. Or the people who aren't doing what they ought to be doing, aren't saying what they ought to be saying, aren't living the way they ought to be living, all because they aren't doing what they're doing with any heart at all. If you're going to blame anyone for what happened, you've pretty well got to blame everyone. In fact, you might as well blame the human spirit for flickering each time and looking like it's going to die just before it comes back to life.
I wasn't blind, of course, and I wasn't deaf. I'd taken some notes and these scribblings tend to come alive late at night when you live in a small basement apartment and you find yourself wondering whether to kill yourself or go bowling and, possibly instead, you decide to write. And you observe things, of course, when you find yourself flying perhaps too close to the souls of beautiful, doomed people who embrace you with an open honesty that almost makes you ashamed. The writer of fiction, it would seem, is sometimes like a small child at a formal occasion and he doesn't truly comprehend if it's a wedding or a funeral and in the end, I suppose, it doesn't really matter because the child will soon learn to see and hear and think like everybody else and maybe someday he'll write it all down and make it disappear.
There is another school of thought, of course, probably the prevailing one, which contends that literature and art do not make things disappear but instead make things last forever. Both schools of thought are correct and both are wrong, just as you or I may be correct or wrong and sometimes a little bit of both at the same time. There is no doubt art can cause the idea, likeness, or interpretation of the subject of that art to endure in the minds of men. It is also true, though there is little empirical evidence to prove it, that the very process itself of transmogrifying the muse into the art may mean that the muse has no more further reason for being. These are not thoughts, however, that a writer should be thinking. Not if he wishes to write.
Actually, I wasn't thinking only of metaphysical matters that night. I was thinking of Clyde P. and Fox H. and hammering furiously on my Smith Corona electric typewriter when something happened that gave me quite a turn. I saw a face at the window. When you live in a basement apartment, you realize this may come with the territory but at one o'clock in the morning it can still be a rather frightening event. Someone had not only been watching me write, I had the distinct and highly disturbing feeling that someone, indeed, had been watching me think.
I walked cautiously to the window, acutely aware that I was backlit perfectly for some rambling psycho to blow me away for no rational reason. For no rational reason, I felt a twinge of guilt about the fact that I'd just been engaged in the process of transforming my two new friends into little black etchings in my war against the blank white page. Why did I not view writing about them as a tribute to them? Why did I feel I was somehow using them, changing them forever from people to characters? And what was a character, anyway? It was people, only more so. And I had been doing nothing wrong-only practicing my desperate art, which had been rusting away for
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