Piano Crave

I'm sure I've posted about this before, but there it is. I'm watching someone play 'That's Why You Go Away' by MLTR on the piano and I'm just like - I WANT.

I suppose I'll try to go brush up some guitar skills and make do with pathetic guitar strumming (only pathetic because it's me, bahaha).

All righty.

Nicole Krauss

Quotes from Great House by Nicole Krauss:

'What I thought was a simpler, purer prose, more searing for being stripped of all distracting ornament, was actually a dull and lumbering mass, void of tension or energy, standing in opposition to nothing, toppling nothing, shouting nothing.'

'In her work the writer is free of laws. But in her life, Your Honor, she is not free.'

'I began to suspect that instead of exposing the hidden depths of things, as all along I'd supposed I was doing, perhaps the opposite was true, that I'd been hiding behind the things I wrote, using them to obscure a secret lack ...'

'... a fraud who hid a poverty of spirit behind a mountain of words.'

'... to learn from the painful lessons of self-scrutiny, and correct a little, to find the way out of the maddening circular game where we are forever eating our own tails.'

'And what of it, Your Honor? What of my life? You see, I thought - One has to make a sacrifice. I chose the freedom of long unscheduled afternoons in which nothing happens but the slightest shift in mood as captured in a semicolon.'

'Such is life, my boy: if you think you're original in anything, think again.'

'What is it like, I once demanded of you, to be a man of such high principles that no one else can live up to them? But you only turned your back on me, just as you turned your back on everyone who betrayed you with their shortcomings.'

'... Lotte was content to live in a perennial state of misunderstanding. It's so rare, when you think about it, a trait one can imagine belonging to the psychology of a race more advanced than ours.'

'If I wanted her, I stood at the bottom of the steps and called up.'

'... the relief of at last being surrounded on all sides by your own kind - the relief and the horror.'

'I thought of stopping to ask her what was wrong, maybe even taking her out for a drink ... but in the end it was too out of character for the person I have been all my life, whether I've liked it or not, and I kept walking.'

'Suddenly I wanted to cry. Out of frustration and exhaustion and despair of ever really coming close to the center, the always-moving center of the woman I loved.'

'Then came a period when she became scared, aware of how much she was losing by the day, perhaps even the hour, like a person slowly bleeding to death, hemorrhaging toward oblivion.'

'... what they did, they did without compromise, free of the complications imposed on the rest of us by indecision, wavering, regret.'

'... but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel.'

'... written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility) ...'

'... and our eyes locked in one of those looks that sometimes happen between strangers, when both wordlessly agree that reality contains sinkholes whose depths neither can ever hope to fathom.'

Ah, the Paralyses of Art!

I am aware that it is not a competition. It is not a race to see who is better. The worst thing anyone could do – worst because it is shallow and most definitely silly – would be to disregard something because it is good.

Nicole Krauss, I have found, is a genius. Philip Roth, yes, is another genius. And before them, J K Rowling. And Jodi Picoult, at the right times. Natsuo Kirino too, for Grotesque. 

So how do you compete with all that? I ask myself. How do you put yourself in the game when, after reading some extraordinarily profound, poignant and flawless piece of craft, you come away feeling like there is too much you don’t know to even begin writing? And what right, really, do you have to write when there are writers the likes of them?

The answer is, really, not an answer at all. Perhaps it is more a turning away, but I prefer to think of it as an awed sort of acquiescence – the answer is that you don’t compete with them at all.

Instead, the only thing you can do is to learn from them, pick out how they’ve honed their voices into finely tuned instruments, individual as the shape of one’s shoes or cushioned chair, fashioning a brand that rises out of the page to yell ‘This is Nicole Krauss!’ You read and re-read their work, jot down quotes that – at the moment of reading – have you nodding along in breathlessness.

What right do you have, you ask then, to write? Well, that’s easy. There is no right, ever, that has to be earned in the name of art.