Thursday, November 15, 2007

Extract from THESE STRANGE HOURS, the autobiography of Loren Eiseley

I stumbled upon this book, written in the early seventies by a man who came of age in the thirties. It is beautiful and brilliant and delicate. And here is a very small piece of it that particularly moved me and I thought worth sharing with all who have a passion for writing their lives.


"In all the questioning about what makes a writer, and especially perhaps the personal essayist, I have seen little reference to this fact; namely, that the brain has become a kind of unseen artist’s loft. There are pictures that hang askew, pictures with outlines barely chalked in, pictures torn, pictures the artist has striven unsuccessfully to erase, pictures that only emerge and glow in a certain light. They have all been teleported, stolen, as it were, out of time. They represent no longer the sequential flow of ordinary memory. They can be pulled about on easels, examined within the mind itself. The act is not one of total recall like that of the professional mnemonist. Rather it is the use of things extracted from their context in such a way that they have become the unique possession of a single life. The writer sees back to these transports alone, bare, perhaps few in number, but endowed with a symbolic life. He cannot obliterate them. He can only drag them about, magnify or reduce them as his artistic sense dictates, or juxtapose them in order to enhance a pattern. One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everyone who exalts made-up stories should read these words. Marta, brilliant!

Anonymous said...

"One thing he cannot do. He cannot destroy what will not be destroyed; he cannot determine in advance what will enter his mind."

The whole quote a moving selection Confirming the 'rightness' of writing what wants to be written. Not to be manipulated, rather respected.

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