8/02/2011

Little hope.

"She'd written to her sister that every word was impossible.  She'd said she felt she had to invent the word before she could write it down, right down to the very shape of the letters.  Muscatine would envy her, sapped and tongue-tied.  He had written to me once of his desire to never write again.  If only he could look at a naked page and see nothing but the grain of the paper and its flecks of pulp, he'd told me.  Then, perhaps, he could begin to fathom the simplicities of existence--he could just do what everyone else did; he could fall in love, then out of love, then into love with someone else.  If he didn't write, he was certain, he could concentrate on his own well-being.  But when he looked at a sheet of paper, it was as if the words were already written there--he just had to slip his pen into the groove of the cursive."
~Timothy Schaffert, The Coffins of Little Hope