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  • Annie Dillard, "The Writing Life" (1989) 에서
    책 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 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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