Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Even though I wake up to singing birds these days, spring seems too far off.

It's time to indulge in a favorite thing.

Chris and I went off this weekend.  We have a favorite town along the Mississippi, along with a favorite bar serving "jerk" everything.  I've been missing the South -- the warmth, the food.  Some Jamaican cooking was in order.  And colorful drinks.  And big breakfasts served on doily-covered tables.  We lounged in front of fireplaces.  We ate chocolate-covered Oreo cookies.  We drove through river towns, then tried (unsuccessfully) to get to the top of a bluff (the path was covered in feet of snow).

And we read The Lover.

I've had my copy (the paperback with the cover shown above) since 1994, which I found in a used bookstore somewhere on the Indiana-Michigan border.  It's falling apart by now.  It's as much a book on writing as it is on desire; of course, Duras doesn't see much distinction between the two.

A passage, then, from a favorite thing:

The story of my life doesn't exist.  Does not exist.  There's never any center to it.  No path, no line.  There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.  The story of one small part of my youth I've already written, more or less -- I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it.  Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river.  What I'm doing now is both different and the same.  Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell.  Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried.  I started to write in surroundings that drove me to retincence.  Writing, for those people, was still something moral.  Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all.  Sometimes I realize that if writing isn't, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it's nothing.  That if it's not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement.  But usually i have no opinion, I can see that all options are open now, that there seem to be no more barriers, that writing seems at a loss for somewhere to hide, to be written, to be read.  That its basic unseemlieness is no longer accepted.  But at that point I stop thinking about it.