Jonas David's Blog, page 39

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway

I didn’t think much of For Whom the Bell Tolls[image error] at first, but it pulled me in and left me heartbroken.

Somehow, with sparse descriptions and repetitive words, he made me feel the love between Maria and Robert with a clarity that made me feel sick for them. He made me despise Pablo and respect Pilar and feel a warm fondness toward Fernando. Robert Jordan is the only one I didn’t feel much about, but maybe that was intentional. Maybe he represented the everyman of every war.

I think there is something to be learned from this writing style. Somehow, such vivid and painful images are painted so clearly with such simple words and unadorned phrasing. The more time I have to think about this, the more I want to read another of his books.

 

Playing at crazy

If someone pretended to be crazy for too long, would they become crazy? The same with anything… to truly pretend, you must get inside the headstate of someone. If you’re there too long, would you get stuck?

I wonder if people like Alex Jones and David Ike and so on, played at it for too long and fell into the abyss…

Finale

Game of Thrones is over for the year, and next year will be a short 6 episode final season. What will everyone talk about next?

But is everyone really watching Game of Thrones, or does it just appear that way from inside my media bubble? From my view, it is ‘the show’ that everyone watches. Before that was Breaking Bad, and before that Lost. But is this really the case, or just as I perceive it?

I wonder what shows other people are watching and going crazy for that I don’t hear about…

I wonder what the next show to grab societies attention will be…

All my screens are cracked

My phone screen is cracked, and now my chromebook screen is cracked cause I knocked it off the chair i was sitting on and it hit the fireplace bricks. Great. I am a very clumsy person it seems. These are expensive and annoying mistakes to make! I will have to get a shield for it next time, or case. I suppose I should be thankful this is only a minor annoyance and that I can afford to get a new one… our devices are so fragile, though…

Skip to the end

This is now my writing strategy. I’ve been thinking ‘what’s next?’ for a long time, and I don’t know what’s next but I do know what the end is. SO… why not just, go there? So I will, and see what happens. I can always insert more stuff later.

What approach to take…

If I’m trying my best to make sure whatever I write is amazing, and the best possible thing I can produce at my current skill level, it’s going to take a lot longer. If I write something quicker and put less worry and focus into it, it will be a lot quicker but less quality.

Which approach to take? Write well, or write more? Do I want to be like Michel Faber and write four amazing, brilliant books? Or like Asimov, and write hundreds of books but with not such great prose?

Part of me thinks I should definitely write more, and not worry about the quality. Because to get better at something you have to do it a lot, and worrying about the quality slows one down so much that maybe it can even be hard to get any experience at all.

But another part of me says ‘I can’t write anything less than my best.’ Am I even capable of ‘not caring’ enough to just whip out something really quick? I don’t know… I never have been able to, once I get started on something, I get into it, and I want it to be the best it can be.

Maybe not caring is a skill in itself…

Change, please

I watched this video of an Isaac Asimov video, and THIRTY YEARS ago he is describing how we’re destroying our environment and there will be deserts and the population will destroy earth and so on. We’ve known about this for even longer. Why will nothing change? People are lazy, short sighted, greedy. That’s why. We need to change before our circumstances change. And if we can’t come together and change, then maybe we deserve to die out.

The world goes on

People you haven’t seen for a dozen years are doing interesting, exciting, boring, frustrating, amazing, awful things. They are making friends, having epiphanies, worrying over tough decisions, and maybe you pop into their head now and then, maybe more or less than they pop into your head.

The strange and huge world of other people’s lives is an endless thing that we can never know or comprehend except the edges, like how you can just barely grasp how huge the universe is if you tilt your mind at just the right angle.

We live in tiny bubbles of experience floating in a sea of other such bubbles, all connected and overlapping, but also isolated. Your world of people is different than mine or anyone’s. Your ecosystem of memories functions differently. You could step two feet and enter another persons world that is completely different from yours–different thoughts, different opinions, different jokes, different interpretations of events, different memories…

All it takes to cross bubbles, is a hello and a conversation…

So slow oh no

Remember when I was excited about writing quicker? 20k words, hooray, I thought. Well, that was nearly two months ago… and I’ve only written 5k words since then. What is happening??

I think one important thing is knowing what your goal is. I ran out of things I was sure about, and had to manufacture more ideas–which should be a constant thing!–before I could continue on. So a lot of the ‘writing’ I’ve been doing over the past weeks has been all in my head, generating new material before I type it out.

I’ve been worrying about writing faster, but it actually seems what I need to do is think more. The more time I spend thinking about this book, the more material will be ready to write. Although I am also slow at actually typing it out, too. But the main part is knowing what I want to write next. When I have that, the words don’t stop coming, even if they are coming at a terribly slow rate.

Think think think! That’s what I got to do. Writing sure is hard.

In the shadow of the moon

I saw the eclipse, the total eclipse, and though I’ve seen pictures and knew what would happen, no words or pictures can match the effect of being there.

It begins slowly, a sliver of the sun gone black, a sense of surreality at seeing such a common fixture in the sky and our psychology shifting that way.

Then you begin to notice the light is dimming. It’s around 10 am but it feels like the sun is about to set. It is setting, in a way.

Then you realize that there is hardly any heat on your face anymore. The sun is cold, a winter sun. It gives off chill, thin light that fails to warm your forehead as you stare at the thinning crescent.

Then the moment comes, when you watch that crescent turned line turned dying ember finally blink out–and an instant later, the halo of white, ethereal flames surrounding the black void disk of the moon. The sky is that of twilight, all around you the horizon appears like a sunset. And that strange white light and preternaturally black disk hangs above you like some alien vision. You’re laughing, you’re cheering, you’re putting your hands on your head and jaw hanging open. You feel some connection with something huge, and brief, and singular and completely out of your or anyone’s control or design.

Then, a white flare like magnesium from a single point on the black disk, and the sky lights up with the triumphant return of the sun.

These words are not enough, you have to experience it. You’ll feel a thrill of elation, emotion, of knowing that you witnessed an event that in the past brought millions to their knees, spawned religions and cults and ended rulers and tyrants, and shifted human events that we will never know.