“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Watching the Walls of the Ice Cave


...that's my analogy for writing at present. You have to wait when you feel frozen. Just wait. Then the ice begins to melt a little. You have an idea. If you're writing anything original it feels like that, I think.

The point is to remain present to the ice. Every few sentences or paragraphs, you run into an impasse. When you're finished, a bunch of ice has melted—but there's still ice floating around. Maybe this is what explains the depression that happens when you finish a project—you are acutely aware of its limits.

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