Thursday, July 4, 2013

Independence Day 2013 / "True Independence of The Spirit"



"I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away –first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud.  When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to be a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you’ve never met.”  This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing.  You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand.  Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way.  It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor."

(p. 64-65,  The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit, 2013)


2 comments:

Taradharma said...

very moving account of the writer's experience. I'll have to investigate her - thanks!

Anonymous said...

Love this.