(no subject)

[shadowkat]

Have you ever read something in a novel that reached out and grabbed you? Or spoke to you? Expressing almost perfectly some of your own feelings? Read this lovely passage last night on writing or rather on pondering the need to write - it's from Margaret Atwood's award winning novel The Blind Assassin:

I've written nothing for the past week. I lost the heart for it. Why set down such melancholy events? But I've begun again, I notice. I've taken up my black scrawl; it unwinds in a long dark thread of ink across the page, tangled but legible. Do I have some notion of leaving a signature, after all? After all I've done to avoid it, "Iris, her mark", however truncated: initials chalked on the sidewalk, or a pirate's X on the map, revealing the beach where the treasure is buried.

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. We put on display our framed photographs, our parchment diplomas, our silver-plated cups; we monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. It's all the same impulse. What do we hope from it? Applause, envy, respect? Or simply attention, of any kind we can get?

At the very least we want a witness. We can't stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.

-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Yes, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how I feel about the book overall.