Excerpt:
Eichenbaum’s frozen ink reminded me of a passage in A Voice from the Chorus, Andrei Sinyavsky’s account of the seven years he spent in a Soviet forced labor camp. Near the conclusion, he writes:
"I dreamed of the paper I am now writing on as of an open field or a forest: oh to be able to lose myself in it, to take off and run on breathlessly and, without reaching the end or even the middle, put down somewhere at the edge or in a corner just a few rapid lines. . ."
Unlike many lesser writers, Sinyavsky refused to let the blankness of the page intimidate him. Rather, it serves as a spur to his imagination, to the one thing that makes a writer a writer:
"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."
These paper-and-ink linkages came to me while reading a very un-Russian text, Thoreau’s journal, more than two-million words that ceased only when the writer could no longer lift his pen and dip it into the ink bottle. One-hundred fifty-five years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1857, Thoreau writes:
“The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze.”
“His index cards never got stale.”
"You need paper to lose yourself in its whiteness. Writing means diving into a page and coming up with some idea or word. Blank paper invites you to dip down into its artless expanse. A writer is like a fisherman. He sits and waits for something to bite. Put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and, without even thinking, let alone understanding why, I am sure to be able to fish something out of it."
These paper-and-ink linkages came to me while reading a very un-Russian text, Thoreau’s journal, more than two-million words that ceased only when the writer could no longer lift his pen and dip it into the ink bottle. One-hundred fifty-five years ago today, on Jan. 23, 1857, Thoreau writes:
“The coldest day that I remember recording, clear and bright, but very high wind, blowing the snow. Ink froze.”
“His index cards never got stale.”
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