The first words of your book. As I read, I want to believe you’re sitting close by me, content within this thick stack of pages. Perhaps you are, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll find you here. Then, straight away, just as I’m settling in to talking with you, you state your intention to take first “painful” and “well-nigh insuperable” steps elsewhere.
A painful departure then? But you are resolved, and have packed existential joy and incertitude too:
So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do, if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose.
An Interrupted Life: the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43, Etty Hillesum (p.1986)
Why is the beginning, the initial departure, so hard for writers? Is it an admission that life—the substance of your work—is nothing but a distraction?
Lucid thought, an orgasmic groan, intoxication, good works, deadly indifference… none can unravel the “tightly wound ball of twine” you mention that binds you deep down. No life experiences can do that. Except for writing. This step.
And the stakes in starting are high. That bright and unchartered road that forces you to abandon a more real life might be a long, slippery slope into a momentous nightmare that is impossible to leave. It is the risk of a dead end you cannot will yourself to abandon… these too are reasons why beginning is so difficult.
Before I turn even the first page of your book, I ask the you in the book, you across time and space, you who might have heard these words in another period: How can we unravel and let things pour out of us? How can we begin? Should I turn a page or should we write a page together?
