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To create a thing,
to hold it,
to read it,
to see it,
and never to know it.
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The dread word stands in my way.
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“Impossible.”
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Only if I could forget it, forget myself, forget every pen-stroke, key-stroke, moment of inspiration and frustration; only then could I know this thing as itself.
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I have the misfortune to be inside, looking out; never outside, looking in.
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Perhaps readers envy the intimate knowledge writers have of their own work. When I was younger, I might even have been guilty of such misunderstanding.
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Now I know better.
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I am too close to the canvas to ever see the picture. No amount of earthly time can give me the distance I need because the picture itself is indelibly engraved in me.
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Never will I walk up to a shelf, see a title or a cover that interests, lift this story up, and judge it as the thing it is.
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Knowing a thing too well can mean not being able to know it at all.
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The implications are overwhelming, ironic, and inescapable. I cannot know my own work save in brief glimpses through the eyes of others.
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That is how it is, and how it must be, and I must accept it and continue.
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The joys of writing and the chance of giving something precious (as many books have been to me) to someone else, are far greater than this little shard of horror. But there will always, I think, be a part of me that is sad that I cannot split myself in two and read, as only a person other than me can, my own work.
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It is not that I think my work great, or that I worry it is bad. I have spoken of that already. It is my simple desire to know it.
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I want to write a book, and read it too. But I have discovered a sad truth of writers.
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The stories we can never read, are our own.
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jubilare 