Reality Hunger (46 page)

Maybe the essay really is just a philosophical investigation; maybe, because it’s masked by other forms such as story or memoir or lyric or fable, we ignore its most basic form.

The motor of fiction is narrative.

The motor of essay is thought.

The default of fiction is storytelling.

The default of essay is memoir.

Fiction: no ideas but in things.

(Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

Someone once said to me, quoting someone or other, “Discursive thought is not fiction’s most efficient tool; the interaction of characters is everything.” This is when I knew I wasn’t a fiction writer, because discursive thought is what I read and write for.

My daughter, sick, at six: “My thinker isn’t thinking.”

Freud (declining drugs to alleviate pain caused by cancer of the jaw): “I prefer thinking in torment to not being able to think clearly.”

I hate the inner life.

I’m tired of the thoughts I steer by.

There’s always a recursive component to utterance (repetition deprives a last stand of its dramatic force).

—the chronic American belief that there exists an opposition between reality and mind and one must enlist oneself in the party of reality.

American intellectuals, when they’re being consciously American or political, are remarkably quick to suggest that an art marked by perception and knowledge, although all very well in its way, can never get us through gross dangers and difficulties.

What I love: the critical intelligence in the imaginative position—D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature;
Wayne Koestenbaum,
The Queen’s Throat;
Nicholson Baker,
U & I;
Geoff Dyer,
Out of Sheer Rage;
Terry Castle, “My Heroin Christmas”; Anne Carson,
Eros the Bittersweet;
Roland Barthes,
S/Z;
Nabokov,
Gogol;
Beckett,
Proust;
Proust, all;
William James,
Varieties of Religious Experience
. Sister Mary Ignatius, in other words, explaining it all for you
—les belles dames sans merci:
Joan Didion, all the essays; Pauline Kael, pretty much everything; Elizabeth Hardwick,
Sleepless Nights
.

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist and then offer a résumé, a commentary.

A student in my class, feeling self-conscious about being much older than the other students, told me that he’d been in prison. I asked him what crime he’d committed, and he said, “Shot a dude.” He wrote a series of very good but very stoic stories about prison life, and when I asked him why the stories were so tight-lipped, he explained to me the jailhouse concept of “doing your own time,” which means that when you’re a prisoner you’re expected not to burden the other prisoners by complaining about your incarceration or regretting what you had done or, especially, claiming you hadn’t done it. “Do your own time”: a seductive slogan. I find that I quote it to myself frequently, but really I don’t subscribe to the sentiment. I’m not, after all, in prison. Stoicism bores me. What I ultimately believe in is talking about everything until you’re blue in the face.