"When I first started, I thought it would come spontaneously, in a trance-like outpouring. So great was my need to write that I thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very slowly so far. Even on the best days I have not been able to write more than a page or two. I seem to be afflicted, cursed by some failure of mind to concentrate on what I am doing. Again and again I have watched my thoughts trail off from the thing in front of me. No sooner have I thought one thing than it evokes another thing, until there is an accumulation of detail so dense that I feel I am going to suffocate. Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel like the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how close I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it."
- Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude
Photo by Robert Essel NYC from Corbis
1 comment:
Interesting. I sometimes feel that way that what conceptialize in my mind sometimes is beyond words and it is as if I need a printer connected to my brain so that my thoughts can just print themselves off either in visual or verbal content.
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