Looking back, I was naive. No, not just naive. I had not fully matured as a writer even. I was living still, in a state of purgatory, and living I was happy, my chest bursting with a loving heart that pounded so loud that I could sense it beating in my throat, the throbbing of desire, I could taste the thrushes of blood that rushed to my head, filling my veins and bursting open into wild thoughts. The way it came out was like a carnival of idiotic thoughts, and a stream of nerves tingling at my fingers end, so the only resolution, to relieve myself was to pick up a pen, and write. But I was scribbling, hastily jotting malformed thoughts down, and reordering ideas into a story without cohesion. The only thread was the trace left behind by the character's wandering. And the character was a wholesome person, too real for fiction, a happy character with a family, with children, gathered around a dinner table. If I have the courage to pull the manuscript out of the bottom drawer of my desk, I want to burn it to ashes, if it wasn't for the first chapter, which still holds the promise of another story, and I tell myself, Albert, put it back, something will come to you, and it will prove its purpose. But happy to place it back in the bottom drawer, I hope to forget about it, but I never do. Is that perhaps happiness, the haunting spirit of failure? Too much A Happy Death was still centered around happiness. Hunted by failure, the story's death, I became a writer. Because for the writer, happiness has no meaning, only when I learned to see unhappiness and the lack of meaning was I able to write The Stranger.
No comments:
Post a Comment