I’m reading Robert A. Caro’s “Working”, a book about his writing process (he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his books). In the introduction he said more than once that he wrote the way he did – slowly, over many years – because “there really was no choice involved”, that he was just being himself, and there seemed to be no other way to be. He also researches his books the way he does because it “just seems to be a part of me… Looking back on my life I can see that it’s not really something I have had much choice about”.
And when he was much younger and writing in school newspapers, even going so far as to start one in elementary school, he had always written in a certain way because he “liked finding out how things work and trying to explain them to people. It was a vague, inchoate feeling” and that was it – he was and could only be himself, following that vague, inchoate feeling within him to its necessary conclusions.
I can relate so much to this feeling that we are in the end who we are, that there seems to be a certain essence in us that we must allow to guide us through life. If we defy this compass, we can end up in places we don’t belong. But if we trust it, follow it, we might do something as grand as fulfilling our purpose.
*
I remember when I first fell in love hard with reading, I was 17 and in junior college. I skipped quite a few recesses or went to the library almost every break I had so I could hide there and read and read and read. I had an endless appetite for books. But I loved books mainly for their words and not the stories. Words were what was attractive to me; a good sentence was downright sexy. I was crazy about words, I thought about words all the time. I sat on buses and wrote in my head, feeling the shape of my words and my sentences, and I read books and I savoured the words I read, drank, inhaled. It was a kind of pure aesthetic pleasure, quite electric in its own way. Even today it’s not the stories that get to me, but the words and the sentences.