A few months ago I was slogging through Blood Meridian, and about 3/4 of the way through, Cormac McCarthy writes:
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it from birth and thereby bled it of all its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
There are things against which I know I should not measure myself. I imagine McCarthy’s prose is high on that list. I haven’t thought of anything compelling to write here since I read those lines, though it may comfort you to know that I have been hacking away at a short story in the meantime. Funny how I can deem myself irrelevant in the face of words like those, but feel somehow more justified in spooling out some fiction.
Sometimes a truth stays ringing in my ears, hits my own personal resonance frequency, and I linger on it, taut and humming, until it fades. I’ll let you know when this one does.
You must never hold yourself up against other writers. Not in measuring the value of your own unique voice. And not in measuring your own talent. Believe me when I tell you, you have a gift for words. I don’t say that lightly; in fact, I’ve known exactly three people in my life to whom I would say that. You are one of them.
Thanks:-) I think this is a many-sided coin, though. If I weren’t struck dumb every so often by something I read, I wouldn’t keep reading. And if I stopped reading, I would almost certainly lose interest in writing. I think I’ve made clear both my aspirations and my ambivalence about writing. Sometimes my unique amalgam of neuroses makes it more rewarding to re-read a paragraph of McCarthy than it is to write something new. That’s all i was trying to say.
I can understand — there are authors I read who do the same thing to me. For me, it’s a double-edged sword; I would like to someday be able to do that to someone via my reading, and at the same time I know I will probably never be able to. But the tiniest bit of hope is there that, maybe, I can (and to be quite honest, I’m still trying to figure out whether I have the talent to make continuing worthwhile). So I keep on writing. I suspect the urge to write is stronger in you, though.
Hi David–
For me, BLOOD MERIDIAN is one of the truly great American novels–of ANY century. I must have read it three or four times. Having the point-of-view character horribly murdered at the end of the novel by the cynical, Ahab-like “Judge” is a masterstroke that WORKS.
But as a writer, I have never let myself be influenced by the novel–except as an inspiration to keep on writing!
Not to worry, David: Very little of BLOOD MERIDIAN (mainly its resonance) will fade from your memory.
I read all seven volumes of Proust’s IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME over the course of a summer a few years ago. It not only inspired me to finish (finally!) the novella I was working on for years; its long, periodic sentences in the revised English translation influenced “Common Ferrell,” that novella.
Other favorite authors of mine (Andrew Holleran, for example) cite Proust as an infuence.
Keep on reading–AND writing–as I know you will–and well!
Lee