Reality Hunger (58 page)

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.

—the sense that the author is writing for her very life.

If you listen, I’ll save your life. If you don’t listen, I’ll die. Also, if you don’t listen, you’ll die a lot harder. There’s the exchange.

Let a man go to the bottom of what he is and believe in that.

Why should we honor only those that die upon the field of battle? A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

There he stood, suffering embarrassment for the mistake of thinking that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life.

The spectacle of baring the naked soul is meant to awaken the sympathy of the reader, who is apt to forgive the essayist’s self-absorption in return for the warmth of his or her candor.

Vulnerability doesn’t mean that anything personal goes. The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we would otherwise not get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake. Efforts at self-revelation fail not because the personal voice has been used, but because it has been poorly used, leaving unscrutinized the connection, intellectual and emotional, between the observer and the observed.

We have too many things and not enough forms.

For if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

Watching Dave Chapelle a few years ago at the height of his fame and anxiety, I was in constant fear/excitement that he was going to go completely out of control and be taken off the stage in a straitjacket.

I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like a Jesse James.