"I awoke and discovered my boat was no longer moored, and now I'm adrift with my ponderings." Noted oral poet Tony Judge said that to me on the phone the other day.
Lately I've been feeling the same way.
A young writer must take his intellectual preoccupations seriously, no matter how strange or irrelevant they may seem. In fact, especially if strange or irrelevant, they may seem.
An older writer can acknowledge that most of his preoccupations—though he is still not positive which ones—are the fascinations of a foolish child.
(I think about what it must be like on the 12th green at Augusta National Golf Club, at 3:00 a.m.—and what it must be like in the dark, cold dirt below it. I am fascinated by the bottom of a boat, always in contact with water. I touch the skin of a 737, which has felt the air rush by at 585 m.p.h. at 35,000 feet. What do I think about these things? I don't know what I think of them, just that I do. There are so many more things like this, most of them too strange to even explain in words.)
The fascinations, and the only true possessions.
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