strange
I don't know what's more strange - that I turn my head to the side and see words I've written in dry erase marker floating on my window, that I have the same quote posted twice around my apartment, or that every week that quote changes. This week it's:
We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
-Henry James
Maybe what's strange is that I've basically been writing for the past 48 hours straight and finished with a story I am not at all happy with, that has nothing I want to read to the class, and am so disillusioned with the whole thing that I'm wondering what I'm going to come out of this program with at all. Because of one story.
The quote last week was:
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-Thomas Mann
But maybe this is more fitting for right now:
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
-TS Eliot
That's kind of how I feel now. But I think in a good way. I don't know if I was too happy with my personality, so forcing it into extinction is really just what I wanted.
Maybe what's strange is that after half a weekend of self-loathing and self-sacrificing, I'm here, still, at my computer, typing away furiously because I still love the clickity clack even at 6:30 in the morning with no sleep.
posted by americanknight @ 6:27 AM
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