The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The mornings begin at about five degrees.
For the first time in almost a year, Wilson isn’t sleeping in the room with me. I hear him next door when he wakes, shaking off the frowst of sleep and heading to my door.
Some mornings when I take him outside there is fog trapped in the valley, so thick that I can’t make out the mountains. Other mornings the sunrise catches metal chimneys and neighbouring windows: gilt, brilliant.
Each morning gets colder.
O, it is godlike to sit selfpossessed
when her chin rises and she turns to smile;
but my tongue thickens, my ears ring,
what I see is hazy.
I tremble. Walls sink in night, voices
unmeaning as wind. She only
a clear note, dazzle of light, fills
furlongs and hours
so that my limbs stir without will, lame,
I a ghost, powerless,
treading air, drowning, sucked
back into dark
unless, rafted on light or music,
drawn into her radiance, I dissolve
when her chin rises and she turns to smile.
O, it is godlike!
— Version by Basil Bunting (1927)
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.
I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekov: “…and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and posibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.
— Raymond Carver, ‘On Writing’, Call If You Need Me
