Here is my equation for an essay:Ī scheme by which it will develop over a certain durationĪs the essay is developed, a human intelligence evolves itself toward a comprehension of itself and its milieu. My literary project flows out from those moments: it is that process of articulating just why the sentence is correct. If I am fortunate, I will be able to preserve a few sentences that I know are right, but cannot say why. In those minutes of surplus something that was once amorphous and incomprehensible has found its way into language. As I ascend into the light of day I am in a relaxed state. The twenty-one minutes between stations pass as though I have fallen into a second sleep, I read and underline and feel building within me a sense of reaching beyond what I am capable of thinking.
I wedge myself into a corner where I am secure from the jostlings of the other passengers, I close up my ears with the sounds of familiar music, I fix my eyes down into a book. On many days I reach this quasi-bored state after having taken the morning train into the city where I work. In this sense reading may be thought of as a variety of boredom. How fitting that Heidegger links this moment to boredom: it is precisely in those unconstructed white expanses that our thoughts are freed from the channels that normally guide them through a day.
#Avowed by the moonlight novel full
Irrepeatable once they have been lost, they carry within them a full poem. An essential few phrases become the focus of our thoughts, and if we can, we scribble them down immediately. Things heretofore imperceptible emerge into existence. And that is a poetic moment, a moment in which a poem might well have been written.’ In which one’s mind begins to reach beyond – that is precisely it. ‘When Heidegger speaks of boredom,’ quotes Ruefle from Oppen, ‘he allies it very closely with that moment of awe in which one’s mind begins to reach beyond. Just the other day I encountered such a line in the poet Mary Ruefle’s essay ‘Madness, Rack, and Honey’: she calls on Mary Oppen to describe this very experience, and Oppen herself calls on Heidegger to help her do so. We feel awe, gratitude, and magnification. These discoveries come over us with the force of a reclaimed memory: life momentarily regains a sense of potential. We admire those who create these thoughts, even as we secretly believe that we might have been the ones to write them first had we lived differently. These notions spring from a mind similar to ours, except this mind has read books that we have not, has known experiences we lack, has relentlessly stripped away its banalities until this apt remark remains. If the sentence is long enough, the sensation can even overtake us while we are still in the process of reading the thought that summoned it. The identification is instant and intimate. For those who carry a pencil, this is the thing we underline. There is no substitute for that moment when a book places into our mind thoughts we recognise as our own.
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