“For the sake of writing the books”
“It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books.”
– William Faulkner, from the Foreword to The Faulkner Reader (1953)
To me, Faulkner sounds a little bit like L.M. Montgomery’s heroine Emily Starr, who says, “Why, I have to write—I can’t help it by times—I’ve just got to” (Emily of New Moon, Chapter 31; coincidentally, the novel was first published in 1923). I feel the same way, and maybe some of you do, too? Writing for the sake of writing. Is it doom or fate? I don’t know, but I have to write.
Earlier this fall, I visited Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, on a sunny afternoon. (Here are the photos from my visit there last spring: “Would an expectation to read Faulkner be far off?”)
During our week in Oxford, Mississippi, my husband and I also went to an Ole Miss football game. I still don’t know much—or actually, anything at all!—about football, but I did find it fascinating to see crowds gather in the Grove on campus before and after the game, and to watch the whole spectacular event (including the marching band, cheerleaders, fireworks, and paratroopers landing on the field to deliver the game ball).
My sister Bethie and I had a really lovely dinner at a restaurant in Oxford called City Grocery.
And I enjoyed meeting up with my friend Susan at a café in Taylor, Mississippi, just a few days after we had seen each other at the Jane Austen Society of North America AGM in Cleveland.
More about the JASNA AGM next time—I’ll share a few photos on Monday, which is Jane Austen’s 249th birthday.
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Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
“The shock of their colliding shook the world” (the 107th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion)
Christmas on the Grand Parade (an invitation to a concert at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, on December 16, 2024)
Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2024 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
