People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.– Erica Jong.
The point is that if only what endures is real – something Shakespeare, say, believed – then only death is real. All the rest is image, transient, mutable. Even our stories, although they last longer than we do. So what makes them – what makes anything – worth dying for? When everything but death is a lie, a fiction.– Marilyn French
The big problem these days is convincing myself I haven’t sold out. To what or whom might I sell out? To the necessity for a steady paycheck/stable job, I would reply first, foregoing any prattle about corporate masters or “the man” or any such thing. There’s some virtue, I suppose, in the swiftness of my replacement occupation; I was of the wait-around-until-something-happens school for several years.
Two nights ago, I had an in-depth conversation with a good friend about the inner life and writing; after this conversation, I realized that I only halfway took my own advice. However, I silently acknowledged that I was just as desirous to find an outlet for my words as I’ve always been. And yet the nagging doubt over the fear of a flaccid urge to write (pardon the phallic metaphor) is ever present all the same. I have to continue to believe that the rising and falling desire will never occur without the constant habit to back it up.
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