writers
I realized this morning, sipping coffee, sunlight splashed over tops of clouds covering my view in a foggy grey rain, something.
A writer is that person who looks into the life of another, observing in every detail the daily grind, the explanations, friendships, habits and twitches, noting each wart and wrinkle, demanding of explication on everything.
Though a writer may never put pen to paper, she remains, to her end, exquisitely nosey.
A writer is that person who looks into the life of another, observing in every detail the daily grind, the explanations, friendships, habits and twitches, noting each wart and wrinkle, demanding of explication on everything.
Though a writer may never put pen to paper, she remains, to her end, exquisitely nosey.
2 Comments on "writers":
A writer may be nosy, but never more so than a reader. And nobody is more voraciously nosy than a reader who also writes.
I would be tempted to distinguish nosiness fron curiosity, though. Nosiness -- to me -- is a debased form of curiosity, a prying intrusiveness for its own sake. Most writers (and most readers) can admit to a good dose of that. But curiosity suggests the prospect of thoughtful inquiry, the possibility that an observation may be extended into the realm of meaning.
And so a good writer (and a good observer who may or may not write) is voraciously curious. Nosy as all hell, sure, but something more as well. Joseph Conrad (a good writer, if no longer politically palatable in some circles) held that a writer (who he described as an artist) speaks to "the sense of mystery surrounding our lives" and to the "solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear ... which binds together all humanity -- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." I no longer hold so easily with cheap claims about solidarity (finding it far less pervasive and persistent than I once did, although far richer in the stony keeps where it may be found), but I do like the suggestion that minds are vessels for ideas which persist, and that a writer's curiosity is a sort of offering to the cosmos of thought. Even -- or especially -- a writer's curosity about the lives of others.
writers can be nosy readers
the point of which to gain knowledge
and the point of drinking coffee
is to distract the public from your observations
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