22 Dec Amarylis double in bloom. Loving Handke's The Afternoon of a Writer. Going to go all premature and fall back onto the old m-b grid and declare he just might be the great INFP writer I've been looking for all my life! Intuition even a prayerful blessing as we've already seen. Being alone yet not lonely key. One book even given Feeling in the Title. And finding the new, the next, the forward, the not yet as essential as possible. There you have it. And the feel of the voice just right, the feel of the perceptions and explorations. Without judgments or warfares. So may passages I wish I could just paste in and say Yes, yes, that's the way to say that, yes, that's how it is, that's how it feels. That is what is most important in a scene like the one you describe and the sense of landscape you are moving in and through. So glad Lentz told me to look into Handke. I hope I will enjoy Fosse as much down the line, for now it is Handke.
Then on 64 the whole Hymn to Beauty! Followed by the scene with the imperious, stinking talker who destroyed the writer's cerebral castle of writing to be written.
Fine for the writer to write this, but what then of the reader who has not written it but who has (only!) read it? "By isolating myself . . . excluded myself from society once and for all . . . I shall never be one of them." 69 Can the reader not as well share in this (great, guilty) pleasure/honor/distinction/destiny/desire?
"You are a weakling and a liar," said the dancer. So he/we needs a legislator figure after all. Perhaps the J, of the J who is Shadow of the P? A silent listener who issues not an unvarying rule but a wordlessly sympalthetic rhythm which discharges the parties into silence. The ideal storyteller, the ideal audience for the storyteller?
Writing did not bring me inner peace after all. Only Translating can do that. "As a translator and nothing else, without secret reservations, I am entirely what I am; in my writing days I often felt like a traitor, but now, day after day, I feel that I'm true to myself. Translation brings me deep peace." 77 His variation on Beckett's Fail, try again, fail better. Or Booth's today is when they will see what a fraud I am.
"the same urgency . . . allows me to be refreshingly superficial." "by displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own."
"the writer followed him in secret (as he often did with friends as well as strangers) "
the newscaster overpowered by emotion "like a man clinging desperately to a window ledge from which he would fall with a scream."
"Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully?" so similar to Joe's early passage in his life story about his need to be alone.
"Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went?
such a lovely ending "To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment." quoting Goethe, "but I am nothing."
The soft beauty of this book, the gentle wisdom, the light, radiates back into the earlier books and promises forward. I've tried to read his books in the order of publication more or less. This appeared in 1987. Like Fosse's The Shining it could be used as a prayer book, read over and over again. On a daily or monthly or seasonal basis. This uses winter snow and snowflakes for the light, the light of snow up into the house at night.
Should I re-write the whole piece into The Afternoon of a Reader?
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Now this week we are waiting---for the holy day but more for the kids to arrive. TV feels empty. Another Handke book awaits, Across and Repetition, both from 1986. And the weird tales of Algernon Blackwood. Can I read those? "how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming travelling companion as my friend, the Swede."
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