I applaud you.
Sit down and write five pages each day for two
months. You’ll have a book that is 300
pages long.
As it happens, my new memoir is about 300 pages long,
too. However—different from you—writing my
book took ten years!
When you are done with your two-month book—if that
is the time it takes you to write it—then I am happy about you as a person. I am happy because evidently you are a person
who has a very strong sense of three things.
The first thing is where your book came
from inside you. The second thing is
where your book was each day, while you
pushed it along. And, third and most
important, is where your book was going
to end up.
Impressive.
***
However long it takes, one day, your book will be
done.
Or anyway you’ll think that it is done.
Because it had better be done.
Because you really, seriously need it to be
done.
You really, seriously need it to be done because—if
you are me and have taken ten years to finish your book—your brain will hurt as
my brain hurt when I was done. My brain hurt
with a hurt that couldn’t be smoothed over by two fingers of bourbon and a
night’s hard sleep. My brain hurt
because, having re-read my book five times since it was done, I could not tell whether
it is any good or not.
***
So what did I do when my book was done and my brain hurt
me? I got out of Dodge.
My wife Channa, my son Sam, and I got out of Dodge
by going to Orlando, where it was cold during February, and then by going to Roanoke,
where it was cold during the rest of February and most of March.
Cold as it was, in Roanoke we had two grandchildren—we
had Sam’s niece and nephew. Cold as it
was, we had a modest condo for a month, where, as we thought it, we would have nothing
to do.
***
In reality, though—not really nothing to do.
As for Channa, she had two commercial real estate
rent study reports about which to sign off—after all, we needed to make money in
order to get out of Dodge.
As for Sam, he had movies to watch again and again, and
then, when we all went out to restaurants, he had shrimp and pasta dishes to find
on each menu.
As for me, my job was to adventure in social media, in
order to make myself cyber visible and cyber friendly.
***
While we were still in Maine, back before we got out
of Dodge, I dreamed of the sunny south.
In the sunny south—as I dreamed it—I should sit
under a palm tree and delight in pure study.
I would not create
anything. Even the smallest act of creating
made my brain hurt. Instead of creating—as
I dreamed it—I would absorb that which had already been created.
I would make a holy study of God and of His
intentionality. I would take up a study of
the evangelical doctrine of sola
scriptura—the assertion that in Scripture alone, and not in ecclesiastical
tradition, papal or otherwise, is the truth of God revealed.
I would neither argue anything nor create
anything. I would absorb, is all. I would gaze upon that which is pure and upon
that which, being pure, is sufficient.
Perhaps I would gaze with the same intensity as that
beachcombing, rusticating, French painter, Paul Gauguin, when he gazed, in the
1890s, on the maidens of the far South Sea. Those same maidens were the ones he used as
icons while he wondered on his canvas Where
Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
***
It has been more than thirty years since I finished
writing a book. That last one was my
second novel, Paradise. One third of the subsequent thirty years I
spent writing draft, after draft, after draft, of this new book, my memoir. I wrote hard enough finally to figure out
what the book is about. The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to
Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told is about the same three questions
which Gauguin painted.
I knew where I came from—where I came from is
described in the book, funny stories and all.
I knew where I had been during those thirty years since Paradise was published—figuring out how
to make a living and raising a family, fully described, funny stories and all.
As for the third question—where are we going?—that question
is the crux of memoir.
***
Regarding your book—indeed you may finish your book
in two months. I hope you do, proving you
know the answer to these three vital theological questions.
Write it down, my friend.
Write it down and tell us about it. We need to know.
Copyright - Dikkon Eberhart - 2015
This is good Dikkon - and I totally relate. I do feel its important for posterity's sake to put these things down. My memoir only goes as far as High School - wish I had started sooner on the rest! I have kept journals throughout, but only I, and sometimes not even I, could read my scribbling :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for your reply, Flora. Yes, I think we memoirists do it for posterity's sake. After Dad's 100th birthday, I began writing funny stories of our family, for his grandchildren. That centenary was in April 2004. About 1/3 of the stories are still in the book. -- But I love your last sentence, which is a literary and a life metaphor. Once, when your scribble captured the life you were living, it was intelligible and what it said was graspable. Now--years later--your ability to re-grasp that formerly intelligible story has faded. You can't understand the words of the story now as you could understand them before. So--you are a memoirist--urgently you fly to your keyboard. Now you are re-telling the story, as accurately as you can, but you are doing so through a gauze of the fading years. How true--I should say this is--of life itself!
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