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Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life" (1989) 에서책 읽는 즐거움 2018. 4. 7. 11:43
이번 서울 방문 중에 The Best American Essays 2007
를 읽다가 서문에 작가 Annie Dillard 가 언급된 걸 보고 전에
인상 깊게 읽은 그녀의 책 Living By Fiction (1982)가 생각나서
반가웠었는데, 집에 오자마자 우연히 또 그녀의 다른 책 한 권을
얻었다. 아래에 좀 길게 발췌한 The Writing Life 를 포함해서,
이전에 나온 세 권의 책을 하나로 모은 책이다.
(반년 넘게 있다 왔으니 서울에서 살다 온 셈인데, 도서관
라운지에서 이 책의 표지와 작가 이름을 보는 순간,
또 한 번, 딴 세상에서 살다 왔다는 느낌이었다.)
When you write, you lay out a line of words....
You wield it, and it digs a path you follow....
You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully.
Henry James knew it well, and said it best....
"Which is the work in which he hasn't surrendered,
under dire difficulty, the best thing
he meant to have kept?"
It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.
When you are stuck in a book; when you are well
into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet
cannot go on; when every morning for w week or a
month you enter its room and turn your back on it;
then the trouble is either of two things. Either the
structure had forked, so the narrative, or the logic,
has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly
split it up in the middle -- or you are approaching
a fatal mistake....
Find it, and think about it for a week or a year....
Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding,
of course it will mean starting again.
Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating.
It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it
engages all your intelligence....
It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough
to be able to try it, because you select your
materials, invent your task, pace yourself.
It takes years to write a book -- between
two and ten years.
My guess is that full-time writes average a book
every five years: ... or a usable fifth of a page a day.
The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it
progresses -- to secure each sentence before building
on it -- is that original writing fashions a form.
The reason not to perfect a work as it progresses
is that, concomitantly, original work fashions a form
the true shape of which it discovers only as it
proceeds, so the early strokes are useless,
however fine their sheen.
In my view, the more literary the book -- the more
purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the
more imaginative, reasoned, and deep -- the more
likely people are to read it. The people who read
are the people who like literature. ... People
who read are not too lazy to flip on the
television; they prefer books.
The line of words fingers your own heart.
The book was The World I Live In, by Helen Keller,
I read it at once: it surprised me by
its strong and original prose.
I reread a sentence maybe a hundred times,
and if I keep it I changed it seven or eight
times, often substantially.
What then shall I do this morning? How we spend
our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives
that are hard to come by. ... Who would call a day
spent reading a good day? But a life spent
reading -- that is a good life.
Nietzsche, like Emerson, took two long walks a
day. "When my creative energy flowed most
freely, my muscular activity was always greatest."
... on the other hand, A. E. Housman, almost
predictably, maintained, "I have seldom written
poetry unless I was rather out of health."
Jack London claimed to write twenty hours a day.
Before he undertook to write, he obtained the
University of California course list and all the
syllabi; he spent a year reading the textbooks
in philosophy and literature.
Much has been written about the life of the mind.
I find the phrase itself markedly dreamy.
I returned to the papers and enclosed a paragraph
in parentheses; it meant that tomorrow I would
delete the few sentences I wrote today.
Too many days of this, I thought,
too many days of this.
I do not so much write a book as sit up with it ...
As the work grows, it gets harder to control it;
it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit
it everyday and reassert your mastery over it.
If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly,
afraid to open the door to its room.
What will teach me to write? a reader wanted to
know. The page, the page, that eternal blankness,
the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly ...
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood,
you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim
through the wood; aim for the chopping block.
Write about winter in the summer. Describe
Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy;
describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk
in Paris. Willa Carter wrote her prairie novels
in New York City; Mark Twain wrote
Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut.
Recently, scholars learned that Walt
Whitman rarely left his room.
A well-known writer got collared by a university
student who asked, "Do you think I could be a
writer?" "Well," the writer said. "I don't know.
... Do you like sentences?"
Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of
Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis
Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and
Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied
Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved
Homer, Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner
described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and
Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to
Jane Austen and Proust.
It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe
than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might
as well write Moby-Dick.
Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty
laid bare, life heightened and its deepest
mystery probed?
One line of a poem, the poet said -- only one line,
but thank God for that one line -- drops from the
ceiling.... and you tap in the others around it
with a jeweler's hammer. Nobody whispers it in
your ear. It is like something you memorized
once and forgot. Now it comes back and
rips away your breath.
Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in
the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give
it now. The impulse to save something good for a
better place later is the signal to spend it now.
Something more will arise for later, something better.
"Purity does not lie in separation from but in
deeper penetration into the universe," Teilhard de
Chardin wrote.
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