by
Helen Garner
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Spectacular dawns I see from my bedroom window. Sometimes I look out at this richness of sky—layer after layer of colour rising from a bed of dove-grey cloud—and I think, This is a rich person’s view, or an adult’s view. As if I were not entitled to it, or had it only temporarily, or on sufferance.
I typed THE END. I rushed home ‘dizzy with unconsumed excitement’. Could not seem to get much of a response from the people present. ‘I’ve finished. I’ve typed the words THE END.’ ‘What—again?’ ‘Guess what, I typed THE END.’ ‘You’ll have more to do.’ But then someone went out to get champagne and they made a fuss of me, which embarrassed me, for I felt I should have been mature enough and tactful enough to have demanded less of them. I will never get this right.
Is this ‘the artist’s’ fate? Always to be loved less than I need; or somehow to repel love, or what is seen in the myth or dream of our society as normal marital love? I feel I’m reaching my strength, in my work, but there’s a corresponding falling-away…It’s terribly sad.
In my dream someone said to me, ‘I want to look for some graves.’ I said, ‘So you can desecrate them?’ Even in my sleep I was laughing.
love her
Why married people have affairs: you feel luckier, with a happy secret place in your imagination in which to refresh yourself. My mistake in the past has been to keep it on the front boiler, cooking briskly, instead of turning off the gas and letting it go cold.
The Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante says that the writer is important not because he can write but because he can listen. His job is ‘to catch the human voice in flight’.
Peter Handke’s notebooks, The Weight of the World. Intense pleasure at the tininess of his observations. Actually, they’re not observations so much as junctions between moments. When I read them I feel that I am not after all crazy or even weird. I feel strengthened, private, encouraged. I feel the worth of very small things. The whole cast of his mind is familiar to me.
that's how i feel reading this!!
‘Writing: safe again.’ —Peter Handke. He’s more brutal with himself than I have ever been. He inspires me to try to be more truthful in this book. It’s hard, for I am always hiding something, either from myself or from the person who may or may not, today or on some future day, read this and be inclined to think less of me.
Handke: ‘I thought of art as a parachute that would stop me from falling.’
I read through the first draft of my story and saw immediately the point at which it goes off the rails. It gave me great satisfaction to know that my critical apparatus is in working order.
heh, glass half full