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Plaintext: Essays
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Nancy Mairs137 ratings, 4.04 average rating, 15 reviews
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“Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Plaintext: Essays
― Plaintext: Essays
“No more Gifted Girl with Lots of Potential. No more grandiose intentions of being a writer when I grow up, never realized because the products never come right and so I'm safer to sit than to start the inevitable failure. This is all the grown up I get to be. No more "dream" world, more perfect than the "real" world, waiting if only I can find the small golden key: in which I love and rear my children without pain; in which I gratify my husband's slenderest desire; in which I dust all the surfaces in my room every morning instead of at Christmas and Easter; in which I understood how to solve a basic quadratic equation; in which someone discovers all the poems I haven't written and publishes them in The New Yorker. There is one world--this world--and I made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me.
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to the other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Plaintext: Essays
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to the other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Plaintext: Essays
“No more Gifted Girl with Lots of Potential. No more grandiose intentions of being a writer when I grow up, never realized because the products never come right and so I'm safer to sit than to start the inevitable failure. This is all the grown up I get to be. No more "dream" world, more perfect than the "real" world, waiting if only I can find the small golden key: in which I love and rear my children without pain; in which I gratify my husband's slenderest desire; in which I dust all the surfaces in my room every morning instead of at Christmas and Easter; in which I understood how to solve a basic quadratic equation; in which someone discovers all the poems I haven't written and publishes them in The New Yorker. There is one world--this world--and I made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me.
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Plaintext: Essays
In many ways these recognitions have been freeing. In my mushy adolescent meditation on "the border between this & that," for instance, I wrote that "more than carrying that into this, to gape at, but never touch, I want that to be this, so that my dreams are tangible, so that I must not live always in my mind, existing only in my body. I want to unite my mind with my body to be whole." Now that I know that the border I perceived was, like any border, an arbitrary political line inked across the geography of existence, I spend my mornings writing essays, then turn without disruption to other tasks of inscribing a life. None of the writing is easy, but I no longer refuse to do it for fear that I'll fail to get it right. It can never be right, I know; it can only be done. Life as scribble. And the reverse.”
― Plaintext: Essays
