I could not understand where the shyness came from.  I liked that I had a place to go where I was comfortable, but going out for me was fraught with peril.  Going out after the last night of the work week to the Beaujolais Nouveau party at BDC was a mistake (not that it did not have pleasant moments.)  Where does one belong in this world.

But I began to find that the shyness came from the words.  It came from a self-protective instinct, one that had to do with the words.  It had been a long habit of mine.  The words were not, as Hemingway once put it, vaguely, something about attempting to show something left of what once had been complete;  did he make reference of a broken piece of pottery, or a human limb, I forget.  The urge, the need, to protect something fragile and personal.

It's as if within them there are seeds.  Something to protect for a long time.  Who knows why.  Maybe because the words are serious to you, embedded into a central place within.

And without knowing it, most of the things you do, like the job you choose, the hours  you must keep, speak of being a professional, protecting the life of those words, their sanctity, their importance.  Other people might ask, why are you holding on to such things?  Forget about them.  but they were a crucial part of a garden, the dirt, the roots, the stalk, who knew...

It was all necessary to understand, if you wanted to grapple with those events, the memories of which gnaw at you in unprotected solitary moments such as waking, or alone.

The work you did could never be a professional involvement, a professional engagement, of the sort that writing professionals must embrace journalism, factual details, research and the like.  That would be an offense to the holy spirit.

People then might wonder, why would be such a job, when you could obviously doing something like that, more professionally in keeping, in their understanding, of gift and education and the like...  I'd heard that a few times.

But stubbornly, I put up with that, and just kept on, more or less content within, as long as I got a day off, a bit of protected time to allow the words and I to meet again in that mysterious open plain, a sort of agreed upon secret meeting place, a place of liberation.


I guess the thing you realize is the necessary secrecy, that sense that the words themselves cannot be violated.  Perhaps this makes it difficult for a writer to have a conversation;  the thing that most people identify with as their main topic of conversation is their job, their profession, and this is precisely what a writer must very much avoid, considering it, or rather finding it, a violation of the personal.

So there is a difference, one that goes way back, most likely to formative years, the difference between those who master the surfaces, the styles, the lingo, the gab, the show, and those who keep integral parts of you, involved deep within, not for public consumption.  Do you focus on the shell, or that within?  There seems little choice.   It's a matter of time.

And one can of course hope that the world will come round at some point, be a part of that partnership which is readership.  Like the tossing of a ball from one person to another, a reader sharing what he has read it its essence.


There is the, perhaps there will always be, the authorial balancing act.  What can the writer reveal about the deep, while remaining private.   The only real material he will ever know must come from his own self, his own experiences, his own tastes, his own style, his own encounters.  And the space he can create is done largely through creating a chamber of reflection.  The reader, by this analogy, senses the echoes, the connections, the integrity that makes the chamber a whole, but the main part its he unseen depths.  A lot goes into those depths, down the small daily acts of doing the dishes, or, as Agee does in A Death in the Family, shaving before a mirror.  This is the test of whether a piece works.

Shakespeare could somehow transfer, translate, and do all sorts of math.  But ultimately he is Hamlet, a person with a very rich and personal life with words, with less of a gift to make the clean decisions that those who live on surfaces, ignorant of the interior, do, with their power grabs, with their taking of queens and kingships, with their defense of perceived honor.   Hamlet, who remembers Yorick from childhood...

This is the pleasure of reading, to discover the essential.

And also the test of literature, for both the writer and the reader.




But the times, we have come to live in, the focus on the shallow, on the surface, so focussed, no wonder the powerful gate keeper, rather than focussed on the inner world, have behind their facade, a wealth of inappropriate behavior, particularly centered around that which is most private and unsharable.