Reality Hunger (56 page)

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment; death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.

The difference between you and me is that I die alone.

We are and we are not.

it is much more important to be oneself than anything else

I find myself saying briefly and prosaically that it is much more important to be oneself than anything else.

Listen carefully to first criticisms of your work. Note carefully just what it is about your work that the critics don’t like—then cultivate it. That’s the part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics.

What you respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her own limitations.

Write yourself naked, from exile, and in blood.

Of all that might be omitted in thinking, the worst is to omit your own being.

This isn’t just an epigram—life is more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

First person is where you can be more interesting; you don’t have to be much but a stumbling fool. And I find this often leads to the more delightful expedition. The wisdom there is more precious than in the sage overview, which in many writers makes me nearly puke.