Reality Hunger (44 page)

The perpetual aura of doubt is what gives his monologue its authenticity.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

thinking

The world exists. Why re-create it? I want to think about it, try to understand it. What I am is a wisdom junkie, knowing all along that wisdom is, in many ways, junk. I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation. Who cares about anything else?

“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”—so goeth the Samuel Johnson dictum; I most admire those books that not only enable me to endure life but show me how they got there. Serious plumbing of consciousness, not flashing of narrative legerdemain, helps me understand another human being. The former is boring in a good sense; the latter is boring in a bad sense. Not
The world is boring; I want to escape it
but
The world is fascinating; I want to investigate it
.

I don’t know what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

I bear in my hands the disguise by which I conceal my life. A web of meaningless events, I dye it with the magic of my point of view.

No artist tolerates reality.

If I had the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.

Is there a sense in which a writer’s vision gets more thoroughly and beautifully tested in a book of linked stories than it does in a collection of miscellaneous stories or in a novel? How do linked-story collections combine the capaciousness of novels with the density and intensity of stories? Why do linked stories often have a stronger thematic pull than novels? How does each story in a collection of linked stories achieve closure-but-not-closure? What’s the difference between repetition and reprise? To what degree do linked stories seem to be about pattern, about authorial obsession, about watching a writer work and rework his material until he simply has nothing more to say about it? What epistemological questions thus get raised? What ontological questions thus get raised? For example, is everything we know provisional? I’m thinking of Lermontov’s
A Hero of Our Time
, Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
, Denis Johnson’s
Jesus’ Son
.

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see, and what it means.