Writer: A Definition
Sunday, March 29, 2009
These words read an hour ago in "Waiting," Anthony Lane's New Yorker piece on Samuel Beckett's life and letters.
... the only thing that separates the writer from ordinary folk—and, far from making him or her a better or wiser person, let alone a more amenable one, it can redouble the force of solitude, “one’s ultimate hard irreducible inorganic singleness”—is that the reading of a poem, or the pondering of a Crucifixion, becomes an event. Not a diversion, a flight, or a release from chores but an experience no less transformative than a day in bed with a lover—especially if, as in Beckett’s case, lovers were scarce.
Is this it, then—the line that gets drawn, cordoning writers off from the rest of the world? It's not a thought I'd had before. It's one that I weigh now.
And you? Your definition of a writer?
