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THE WRITER
I switched on the computer.
First I pulled down the Venetian blind, of course. That was part of my
morning ritual, and on sunny days like this one it has a practical
function. Nevertheless, I also pull it down on cloudy days,
superstitiously aiming for a continuity of ambience. My study looks to the
east, and my desk faces a large window, so that, without the blind, I
would have to squint and scowl until noon to see anything on the screen.
This way there's no squinting, but on cloudy days, for the sake of
continuity of ambience, I strain my eyes in unnecessary semidarkness.
Not that I pull it all the way down. I leave a gap of about fifteen
centimeters above the windowsill, so that sunshine reaches the area where
it is definitely welcome: an eight-sided glass vessel, set in the window.
That vessel, formerly a small aquarium, has been converted to serve as a
flowerpot for a group of miniature cactuses, the kind with very small pink
and white flowers. Light also slants through the narrow slits between the
horizontal plastic bars, creating shimmering arabesques in the dusky air
of the room. Even if I sat with my back to the window, I think I would
keep the blind down at such times of day just to enjoy the transient play
of bright and dark stripes on objects in the room. The peculiar impression
of unreality thus created, one which (for reasons unknown to me) I find
very stimulating, is enhanced by dust motes floating in the air, caught by
diagonal beams of light. I know that some writers are not at all
influenced by their immediate surroundings. For me, the ambient mood is
almost everything.
The trouble, however, is that an appropriate ambience, while surely
indispensable, is not sufficient for success in my work. If my environment
alone mattered, I would have finished the book I am working on long ago.
The environment being faultless, the book got stuck nevertheless—and near
the end, at that. When I began to write it, I had the impression, without
clearly knowing why, that the thing would be a novel. However, matters
took a different turn: episodes succeeded each other, but with so few
connecting points that, as the writing progressed, there appeared before
me something which would be (at best) a collection of loosely linked
stories. Definitely not a novel.
I do not, of course, have anything against collections of stories, nor do
I consider them intrinsically less valuable than novels, yet there started
to creep over me a feeling, if not of disappointment, then definitely of
expectations imperfectly fulfilled. Yet I did not despair of turning it
around: what I had written could still grow from a conglomerate into an
amalgam, but for this to happen, one more chapter was needed, the closing
one, which would grab those only seemingly heterogeneous episodes and
weave them into a whole. Only my intuition told me, and only in whisper,
that such a chapter was at all possible; but intuitions do not write, and
that final chapter, required but by no means guaranteed, stubbornly
refused to materialize.
I deliberately ascribe to that chapter the quality of volition, the
ability to decide, quite independently of my wishes, whether it will or
will not come into existence. I do this without any desire to undermine
the proud authority over their own words to which certain other writers
lay claim. Only in my own name do I speak, and solely on the basis of my
personal experience of writing. In my case, the act of writing can hardly
be called "creative"; I am, at best, perhaps an intermediary...
When I sit at the keyboard, I experience only the vague tension of a
go-between who expects to be used, certainly no sense of divine
inspiration, least of all a godly trance in which I might see the entirety
of the work in a single, all-encompassing vision, and then just sit down
to perform the necessary technical chores, to type it up. Nothing like
that with me; rather the opposite.
At the outset, I face a wall of darkness. I have no idea what I will write
about, what will pop up on the screen. And then, especially if the
environment is perfect, sentences begin to well up spontaneously from that
darkness, while I watch with growing impatience to see how the thing will
come out. If there is any recognizable stimulus prompting me to go on, it
is this reader-like curiosity.
When I am reading some exciting or otherwise interesting work, written by
one of my colleagues of the keyboard, the same curiosity drives me to fly
through the pages; but when I write, there is an unfortunate physical
limitation which prevents me from satisfying that curiosity anything as
fast as I want to. It is this: I type with only one finger—my right index
finger—which, after decades of over-exploitation and maltreatment, has
become markedly larger and more gnarled than its fellows.
Although I manage quite a respectable speed for one finger, the swiftness
with which it flies from key to key is far from sufficient to cope with my
impatience. Yet when I tried to use the fruits of modern technology and
replace the keyboard with a dictaphone, so that I might improve my speed
enormously by just saying out loud those sentences which spontaneously
arise from the darkness—then nothing at all emerged. The silence was
total, as unrelieved as it was mysterious.
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