Devotion

by Patti Smith

You enter the skin of the narrator with his pale sense of paranoia and preoccupation with minutiae and the space around you shifts.

though not really an end, as vapors of future seep beyond the last page,

The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

As I wander about, an unexpected though familiar giddiness overcomes me, an intensification of the abstract, a refracting of the mental air.

Fate has a hand but is not the hand.

Most often the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not embedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.

Silence. Passing cars. The rumble of the subway. Birds calling for dawn. I want to go home, I whimpered. But I already was.

she experienced the melancholy luxury of solitary joy.

The soiled sheets were a testament to their mutual ecstasy and sorrow. She removed the stained sheet and fitted the mat with a fresh one; the sight of it drew them to violate its brightness with mythic depravity. They were at once dogs and gods.

He had written in the margin that perhaps there existed a deeper question—Am I worthy of living? Five words that shook her entire being. She rose abruptly, removed the photograph from its frame, slipped on the sweater, and left, careful to avoid the things that had been his.

We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.

Winter struggled toward spring.

The room is still, yet the atmosphere is charged, a sense of horns locking.

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

I seldom visit people’s homes, for despite the hospitality offered I often suffer a feeling of confinement or imagined pressure. Almost always I prefer the comfortable anonymity of a hotel.

Any trepidation I may have felt dissipated with his kindness and the warmth of their reception.

Somewhere across the field, beyond the cypress trees, one may enter the cemetery where he rests aside his wife, his name somewhat eroded, as if nature had written a story of her own.

It was in his hand, each page suggesting a sense of unflinching unity with his subject. One could not help but thank the gods for apportioning Camus with a righteous and judicious pen.

The first hundred watermarked sheets had Albert Camus engraved on the left-hand side; the remaining were not personalized, as though he had wearied of seeing his own name.

carefully revised and sections firmly crossed out. One could feel a sense of a focused mission and the racing heart propelling the last words of the ...

That is the decisive power of a singular work: a call to action. And I, time and again, am overcome with the hubris to believe I can answer that call.

The hours that pass devour us.

What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.