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October 7 - October 10, 2024
But at boarding school, I was never alone. They didn’t think that privacy was good for girls. So I learned to shut out the din of a crowded dormitory, and now I can concentrate and write anywhere.”
“I tried to understand them. I wrote stories, trying to imagine what it was like for them. I learned to inhabit other selves, other ages. It helped put things into perspective. And now that I am older, I still do that. I’ve never had to lose my younger selves—so that’s why I am every age I have ever been.”
and so tonight I am afraid of ideas—not actualities. An idea has more power over human mind than anything else—actuality you can touch, but ideas are elusive—ununderstandable. But these thoughts have the power to make you understand beauty, fear, rejoice—almost more than actualities.
When you write anything—a poem or a story—it’s yours only as long as only you know anything about it. As soon as anybody reads it, it becomes partly theirs, too. They put things into it that you never thought of, and they don’t see many things that you thought plain.
plus do a little acting on the side in an effort to understand character and dialogue (she would later say that the theater was the best school for a writer),
while she had often chafed at the rules at school, she quickly saw the wisdom of having some guidelines when living with a group of people. She hated doing the dishes but discovered she loved cooking, so that became her job.
Touché, a truly professional performer, would lie completely still around Madeleine’s neck like a fur stole in order to ride the subway back and forth to the theater undetected (since dogs were not allowed on the subway).
Very softly last night Hugh said the first two lines of that lovely poem of Conrad Aiken’s. [Music I heard with you was more than music, And bread I broke with you was more than bread.] We are going to be married. I would like to be able to write about this but somehow there aren’t any words.
the happy gift of never being obvious. She writes with subtlety and in realizing her characters, she suggests rather than explains.
more we realize that it is essential for us to make many friends out of the theatre. We have got to the point where this company bores us to hysteria. Although alone they are all interesting, nice people, when they are together they seem to set up a reaction, to represent everything superficial and artificial. And after an evening of being clever, always with a little edge of smirk to the cleverness, of brilliant surface conversation, we come out feeling wasted and soiled. People ought to stay apart if that is what happens when they get together.
simply: why do I write? And the only really honest answer I can give is: “I have to.”
Perhaps one can reconcile the contradiction between predestination and free will by thinking of the sonnet: within the strict boundaries of the form there is great freedom.
Let me realize that I cannot accomplish a full day’s work in a couple of tired hours a night. Let me realize that I cannot write a valid book without at least as much labour as it takes to produce a child.
The false promises of security through purity of thought and ideology and McCarthy’s methods of investigation, intimidation, and guilt by association weighed on her mind, and she began to explore a creative response.
She always felt like “one of us” and always seemed to be whatever age we were, a comrade and fellow traveler who also nurtured and supported us. She was the woman who sang at the top of her lungs, who played Ping-Pong with gusto, and who had us all read Shakespeare aloud, cuddled up in her four-poster bed. She was the lonely girl who craved connection and who, as an adult, recognized and responded to that need in others.
“Discipline. I saw how if my mother didn’t practice every day, her playing suffered. It’s the same for a writer. You have to practice every day. I also saw how she could go to the piano in a bad mood and usually come away an hour later in a much better frame of mind. I was terribly disorganized and undisciplined in every other way, but I developed enormous discipline for writing, because it was the only thing that ever made me happy when I was younger.”
I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform. This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages, the perpetual student, the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide; my past is part of what makes the present Madeleine and must
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There is something very special about the best grandparent-grandchild relationships. There can be friendship and love without the burdens of daily care and expectations that are so often present between parents and children. She delighted in us and loved us in such a way that we felt truly Named. This book was written out of love in return.
