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"Only a sociopath, after all, could create people just to torture them with "conflict" and "motivation" and "poetic justice"… A sociopath... or a writer."
From this amusing but strangely titled article.
I suppose you do have to be detached enough and cynical enough to be able to observe people quite so accurately though I’d argue that you wouldn’t consciously be doing it. You wouldn’t as the article amusingly suggests ‘take a notebook to an aunt's funeral so we can jot down those telling details’ but I do suspect that you might remember something like ‘the glint of the sun on the teak coffin’ if it caught your eye just so. You’d probably remember the atmosphere; the crunch of gravel beneath your boots, the brightness of the sun that seemed a blasphemy as she was lowered into her grave, your sneer at the people who were only there now when it had ceased to matter to her. Little details like that stick in a person’s mind and at a later date if you suddenly find yourself writing about nature’s disregard for sorrow, about what it feels like to walk up to an open grave, perhaps you might remember. Not in a particularly heartless fashion but with a certain sense of detachment that allows you to now be philosophical about the matter. Because for all that time heals nothing, sometimes it lets you forget, selectively at least and what you remember becomes rose-tinted by flawed perception.
Though of course, what is fiction but the elevation of the mundane, the prostitution of the human spirit in the name of either vaunted art or sensationalised entertainment?
Ars longa vita brevis after all. Let the world remember us for the fictions we leave behind, the fallacies that we make of life, the truth we call art. After all, wasn’t it W. H. Auden who wrote a poem for Christopher Isherwood’s birthday saying something to the effect that it fell to art to reveal truth? The line eludes me now and the volume that would contain that poem is unfortunately in storage like so many of my books these days, so have some other Auden lines that sum things up nicely instead; they’re probably lines I like better anyway:
"But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful."
From this amusing but strangely titled article.
I suppose you do have to be detached enough and cynical enough to be able to observe people quite so accurately though I’d argue that you wouldn’t consciously be doing it. You wouldn’t as the article amusingly suggests ‘take a notebook to an aunt's funeral so we can jot down those telling details’ but I do suspect that you might remember something like ‘the glint of the sun on the teak coffin’ if it caught your eye just so. You’d probably remember the atmosphere; the crunch of gravel beneath your boots, the brightness of the sun that seemed a blasphemy as she was lowered into her grave, your sneer at the people who were only there now when it had ceased to matter to her. Little details like that stick in a person’s mind and at a later date if you suddenly find yourself writing about nature’s disregard for sorrow, about what it feels like to walk up to an open grave, perhaps you might remember. Not in a particularly heartless fashion but with a certain sense of detachment that allows you to now be philosophical about the matter. Because for all that time heals nothing, sometimes it lets you forget, selectively at least and what you remember becomes rose-tinted by flawed perception.
Though of course, what is fiction but the elevation of the mundane, the prostitution of the human spirit in the name of either vaunted art or sensationalised entertainment?
Ars longa vita brevis after all. Let the world remember us for the fictions we leave behind, the fallacies that we make of life, the truth we call art. After all, wasn’t it W. H. Auden who wrote a poem for Christopher Isherwood’s birthday saying something to the effect that it fell to art to reveal truth? The line eludes me now and the volume that would contain that poem is unfortunately in storage like so many of my books these days, so have some other Auden lines that sum things up nicely instead; they’re probably lines I like better anyway:
"But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful."
