Some friends and I are working together on a new book – a selected “Reader” of my grandfather’s best writing. So I’m now rereading some of my favorite books of his.
This piece has always stood out to me – it perfectly captures what Steven Pressfield calls “the war of art” – that simultaneous joy and struggle that arises from doing your life’s work:
January 24 // Story Time:
A day lost… but is time ever wasted? The story, “Skarda,” is taking forever to write. Does it want to be written? Do I want to write it? Why is the process so slow, so painful in the agony of lost time? Often only a word a day. Sometimes a sentence, a paragraph, a few pages. Not like other stories that take hold and run themselves through me in days. Still, I have decided to watch it, do it, be aware of the process of how this story want its own life… a forward, backward movement. The frustration is in myself, wanting, needing it all to end, knowing the work that waits in the wings, desiring to get on with it – yet the story of “Skarda” will not be done with me, with what it must become. Frustration, then, and an edge of fear… fear of all the time it’s taking and that the story may prove inconsequential, not what I envisioned, not what I started out to tell. So I see the time evaporate through these very fingers, losing “Skarda” every day in a few words or sentences or nothing, making other words that become letters, that become poems, that become entries such as this. Words, too, that never even find life on paper, remain instead part of all this which is me, the writer, wanting to , needing to say things about what I am, what this is, what I see… wasting it all in a mind of dream-state, unable to grasp the scheme of it to make it into something now. And the guilt, then, eating myself alive, because the time is now, this moment, and the act is denied, incomplete, unsustaining. And standing outside in the blue snow, the fading light of afternoon, aware hours and hours have passed, my whole body crippled by unfulfilled desire. And I would drag my body, or be dragged, toward the light in the house leaving an erratic trail in the snow that will be covered by morning, when I will step out once again, sure-footed, to this coop, put on the light, turn up the heat, and make whatever it is that will be made, or refuses to be made, in the time of day. For even in time wasted, I suspect (don’t I know?), the living, the dreaming, the making, the loving goes on. The completion will come later (as it often does) and will it not be stronger? Incredible? More unique? As in the hours now gone in this day, have there not been flashes of stories and poems and books ahead? And has not love visited this door? And has there not been the mind’s release, the body’s river-flow? And outside, though a camera’s lens recorded winter, the images of flesh spoke sun, felt fire, flowed and merged past the need of any man wanting to put a measure to it in words.
From “Door Steps” – Norbert Blei