Today I am back in Philadelphia. I’m sitting in my sun-drenched room, alone in the house because I am in recuperation from another attack of diverticulitis. This one started up while we were in Mexico. I could write about it, but I don’t want to talk about how I feel (awful) or how the staff at the Medica San Miguel hospital treated me (wonderfully) or how my specialists here in Philadelphia cured me (awfully well). Rather, I want to give voice to the insight I have now about how I should be writing.
I should not be telling what happened to me, but how I feel about what happened to me.
For example, rather than telling how I met a person, I should be expressing how they made me feel on our meeting. I should also look closely at them, now that I know them so much better, but not nearly well enough to be able to describe how they might have felt on meeting me. Why is that important to either or both of us? Is it important to us? What does it matter? It matters because it is about us, one or both of us, and we are very interested in each of ourselves and by extension in each other. The more you think about it, the more you realize there is a gigantic story we have not even admitted to ourselves about how we feel about ourselves, each other, and the individuals who are intimately tied to us.
I have reached an age where my desire to read, to learn new things, to explore the philosophy of favorite authors is so strong that I scarcely have time for anything else. Can it be that others of my age feel the same? Do you reach a time in life when you realize you never paid enough attention when you were young and in school because you were preoccupied with more important stuff like getting a job, being in love, finding love, losing love or feeling sorry for yourself because of lack of love?
And now I find a new quote: “Love is a reciprocal torture.” Proust
I just received a book from Amazon called Writers in Paris about literary lives in the City of Light. I looked at the cover which held photographs of six or seven authors. I recognized a few – Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I thought about all their stories and writings and wondered: What were the thoughts and ideas that they did not write about? What are the unfinished stories, hidden thoughts, sacred memories, silent feelings that they could not or would not write about? Were any of them like me – afraid for most of their lives of writing about it, about their innermost struggles?