Still Sundays
June 16, 2013.
Sunday at my parents’ farmhouse feels like going through a car wash to cleanse the grimy emotions, collected throughout the week, that stick to your mental skin. When you are ready to leave you have been waxed with love and that’s all you need to shine. I have been fed and loved; and as I am encouraged to “go write” I also must answer, “When will you be done already?” every few minutes.
When you no longer wear stillness like glitter then you must write your heart out before you actually write anything worth reading. It is akin to squeezing out the pus made of thoughts until you bleed what actually matters. Obviously this makes the process even lengthier.
Underneath all my understandings there exists a place that knows the truth beyond words. Sometimes it is hard to get there. I would like to blame the California smog for the haze. I would like to blame anything and anyone but myself for not writing as much as I would like. No one understands that I can’t write within the confines of some structured time and it is not because I lack discipline. Maybe I just don’t know yet that I can. After all, there is so much we don’t know, sometimes even about ourselves. I read last week that a new layer has been discovered in the cornea of our eyes! Maybe now we will actually believe what we see.
My father says Voltaire was a prophet. I agree. I re-read long parts of Candide in one sitting as if reading a letter one has almost memorized.
He convinced them in a few words that it is not enough to introduce one or two of those situations which are found in all romances and never fail to charm the spectators; that it is necessary to be original without being eccentric, often sublime but always natural; to know the human heart and how to express its feelings; to be a true poet without any personage in the piece appearing in that character; to have perfect mastery over language, so as to speak with purity and unfailing harmony, but without any sacrifice of sense to sound.
How can anyone not want to kiss those words?
It isn’t hard to finish books, I thought to myself, as I devoured pages of Candide. Then again, I like hearing the sound, almost like an eternal song, of Truth echoing through Time.
Surgeon’s precision saves lives, so can a writer’s. Those who know the power of words serve as gyroscopes. The world tilts this way and then that way until your thoughts spin so far away from the space where meaning rests, unescorted by words, that only another’s words can take you back to that place, ironically with the help of words.
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Yesterday was my grandfather’s birthday. My father’s father.
My biggest fear—and I am the child that was born without the fear gene, sometimes to my own detriment—is I will not get around to writing my father’s story. There exist people whose lives, the way they have lived and all that they have experienced, become a distinct art form. It is no easy feat to describe the events in such a person’s life. My father is such a man. There are moments when I am convinced he created me with that very purpose in mind. When I was younger that felt like an unfair burden that I didn’t ask for; the older I get, the more ready I feel to rise to that challenge.
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Who wants to be David Henry in this day and age?
Your schooling would have been paid by your siblings’ teaching salaries and your father’s pencil manufacturing job, and after attending Harvard you would have “just been a teacher”. But because you didn’t want to beat children as part of their education, you wouldn’t stay in teaching for more than two weeks. Thereafter, your influential friend would write a recommendation letter for you to get a job teaching in a nearby state in a private school and yet you still couldn’t find a job. Then you will decide to open your own school and that would last for three years before you would resort to various handyman jobs. You would keep a journal which would continue to evolve and you will never stop writing, regardless if anyone would read. Naturally, you would attempt at least once, to move closer to New York in the hopes of getting published, but that wouldn’t work. Next, you would move as far away as possible so as to concentrate on writing and only visit with close family and friends. You would also oppose a U.S. war and hence decide not to pay your property taxes and would get thrown in jail. Eventually you will put together some of your essays for a book and a publisher will say yes but only if you agree to pay for any unsold copies, which will turn out to be a lot more than you expected, and you will owe money. A different publisher will decide to go with a revised version of a different manuscript and although there will be some good reviews, there won’t be enough sales, and the publishers will definitely not be interested in paying for any book tours.
Will you continue to write?
Henry David Thoreau was David Henry and he wrote.
No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the much-vexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations. – From “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau.
