Yesterday I was reading an unconvincing article about why I should be excited about HRC, who is being misrepresented by progressives. Like most of life does, it put me in a gauzy haze of vague depression and filled me with thought that nothing will ever change. However, the article contained one thing that actually meant a lot to me. It was a quote that the author stuck in, as authors do, to show us just how smart he is. It went a little something like this:
“Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.”
It’s George Orwell talking about writing, innit.
I posted it on Facebook even though it surely came across as just a dig at writers. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When I was a little girl, all I wanted to be was a writer. That was the only answer to that question. I wrote poems, even sonnets. They were very very good. I kid. I wrote stories. I wrote beginnings of novels. I recently found a series of poems my Dad wrote me when I was a wee child of 3. This is notable because I don’t know him and I didn’t know he would ever have done anything like that. My mother wanted to be a writer too. But none of us are. My husband is one. But I am not. The rub is that I do write professionally but I am not a writer.
And speaking of Orwell, him. Well, several thoughts converge. One: Last week I ordered my husband, the writer’s, Valentine’s day gift. It was a book by Christopher Hitchens. It’s called “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton.” Christopher Hitchens is dead, of course. He is a writer I once admired very much, and then came to see as someone who lost himself in self-indulgence (I think the final straw was reading an article he wrote for his Vanity Fair column in which he was in a spa with a masque on, smoking. Worthless, ridiculous, I thought.) But dislike evaporates over time, for me anyway. It gives way to sadness or warmth or no feeling at all. And I remembered how much I once liked him, especially when he and others like Andrew Sullivan were teaching me to revere George Orwell,who had a special ability to express the political nature of words, to put it in the bluntest dumbest way.
So I am not a writer. But like writers, I have a lot of envy and jealousy and competitive feelings with and about all writers. I hate them. I worship them. When my husband writes an especially good column or article, I will reread it an insane number of times. It’s exactly like listening to a perfect new song, scratching a new itch. His words are so unbelievably well chosen and his ideas and worldview are so cocky fresh. He is talented. Right now, in this millisecond, I am not jealous of him, just happy for him.
But the darkness is never too far away. Now is a weird moment. It’s my birthday in 2 weeks. I am turning 45 years old. It’s causing some problems. I am acting out. I am acting up but not in a cool way. So I bought myself this blog. I will write this blog, for me. Happy birthday.
Serious. Not serious. 