A Better Writer -- Part III
Between Levity and Gravitas
Jude’s decision to write fiction wasn’t the result of any lengthy thought process, or in-depth discussion, or extensive research. If something made sense to him, he didn’t need any validation or confirmation or mulling over. This didn’t mean that he had a high degree of self-confidence, not at all. He had doubts about anything, and doubts about doubts. But if something hit him right, if the lightning struck, he would embrace it right away, without too much questioning, until proven wrong, and when that occurred -- the proven wrong part, that is -- it was because something else suddenly made more sense to him than the prior thing did. So much more sense, in fact, to replace it entirely. And something hit him right twice in his life, first when he was five and then when he was in his mid twenties. Two major realizations over which, to this day, he hasn’t yet been proven wrong.
At five, he learned to read, and his life changed completely. He soon realized that beyond recognizing and understanding the meaning of written words, he could transform them into images, with colors and hues and chiaroscuros, and this gave him the possibility to extend his life, or to live parallel lives at once. Understandably, these realizations didn’t occur right when he was five and learned to read, but over the following years. He started to notice, for example, that he could create images out of words only when he read novels, not other types of books, like school textbooks. And that this process of image creation came naturally, without effort.
One day, in his mid twenties, he had a dream. In it, someone whose features vaguely resembled those of Borges -- but wasn’t Borges, of this he had certainty, the kind of certainty one has in dreams, where no proof is ever needed or sought -- was resting on a rocking chair underneath a willow tree, a gentle breeze moving his white hair, his melancholy gaze fixed on the nearby ocean’s horizon line. While he was observing the man who looked like Borges from outside the dream, as if he were a spectator, for he had no clear perception of his physical presence in the scene, at some point, which felt like a long time but was probably just a few seconds, the man who looked like Borges turned his head toward Jude and stared at him, his pale blue eyes as penetrating as a blade of ice, although Jude knew that he wasn’t a bad or mean person, or ill-intentioned. Then he said something.
Reality is fluid, endlessly subject to revision, contradiction, and reinterpretation, he said. Even events that have just happened can be disputed -- married couples argue over what was said minutes prior, he continued with an imperceptible chuckle. And then, turning serious again, he added: historians revise accepted narratives with new discoveries, and no version of the past is ever truly final; every detail of history, beyond the broadest strokes, remains debatable, reshaped by perspective and time. Even biographies, he went on, which claim to document a person’s life, can be contradicted and revised -- because, ultimately, no one truly knows what passes through another’s mind. Nothing in real life can ever be told completely, definitively, and beyond the reach of dispute. And he fell silent for some time, during which Jude weighed the importance of what he had just heard. It felt like an epiphany of sorts: everything in reality is disputable. And if that is the case, does truth even exist?
The man who looked like Borges, then, said: fiction is different. And paused, as if to let Jude take in these words properly. Fiction exists entirely within the domain of the author, it’s sealed by their decisions, he resumed. No one can argue that Don Quixote did not die when Cervantes wrote that he did; his fate is fixed, sealed, unchangeable. The same is true for Edmond Dantès -- once Dumas has him execute his final revenge and sail away, no alternative version exists. No one can dispute that Anna Karenina stepped onto the tracks and met her end when Tolstoy decided it was so. Does this mean that truth lies in literature? he asked, rhetorically. Well, not the truth. Fiction offers a kind of truth -- not in the sense of factual accuracy, but in its completeness. But fiction is not a lie either, for a lie implies distortion of an existing, already established truth, if anything like that can be found at all, whereas fiction creates its own truth from nothing. This is why calling fiction a “lie” is misguided -- it is not falsehood but invention, self-contained and unassailable in a way that reality never is. And while the words “self-contained” and “unassailable” echoed through the scenery of Jude’s dream, the figure of the man who looked like Borges started to fade, until it vanished completely.
Fiction creates its own truth from nothing, he kept thinking the morning after, while out running errands. Fiction’s own truth, yet a truth nonetheless. And for some obscure reason that remains obscure to this day, he received solace from that statement -- he felt at peace, rested, tranquil, protected. Perhaps it was the reassurance that no one could ever dispute the truth of a piece of fiction, or perhaps it was the infinite sense of liberty that this idea transmitted, but from that day -- night, rather -- onward he decided that he was going to be a fiction writer. And a fiction reader, too. Although the reading part had already been happening: since the beginning of high school he had viewed reading any non-fiction text -- no matter how insightful or consequential -- as a chore, something to be done with as soon as possible, nothing more. That morning, however, undoubtedly helped by the fact that he had been out of college for a couple of years already, he decided that he was going to read only fiction, one hundred percent fiction.
So, he started writing short pieces, inspired by the authors he dug the most, but also without a plan, without the desire to please any particular readers, or even the need to ensure he was writing properly. He felt free and unburdened, and soon discovered that his stories, in a way, wrote themselves, emerging from the page mysteriously, almost magically. Yet, his voice seeped through unmistakably and recognizably. And he kept thinking about that dream, which had occurred years prior and never since, and the more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t find a valid reason to change his perspective. Until, almost a decade later, the man who looked like Borges appeared again in a dream.
This time, he was standing in front of the ocean, silent, his back to Jude. It was a clear day, and the only sound was his low muttering toward the water, his words drowned out by the crash of the waves on the shore and the occasional screech of a seagull flying by. Jude felt the urge to get the man’s attention somehow, but no words would leave his mouth. He remained a passive spectator, just as before. At some point, the man who looked like Borges turned around, as if sensing he was being watched, and began walking toward Jude’s vantage point, slowly. Boredom, he said when he was about halfway between the shore and Jude -- fortunate are those capable of embracing it. And he paused.
Parents, he continued after a few seconds, tend to avoid letting their children get bored. They believe children must always be engaged, so after school, they take them to activities, and when school is over, they enroll them in summer camps. They fill every gap that could lead to boredom or idleness. Yet boredom is precisely the platform needed to start creating parallel worlds. By becoming bored with the world, one gains the opportunity to create their own -- and creating one's own world is perhaps the highest priority when writing a story, making a film, composing a song, or painting. He then lay down on the sand and fell asleep.
When Jude awakened, it was the middle of the night, and he couldn’t go back to sleep. So he got up, went to his desk, and started writing. The story he had in mind was about a young fiction writer who one night had a dream in which an old man told him that creativity thrives in boredom. So the young writer decided to pursue boredom but couldn’t summon it at will, he couldn’t just say okay I’m going to get bored now, like that, as if toggling a switch. And he tried and tried but whenever he deliberately entered that state, nothing happened, meaning that he wasn’t bored at all, in fact he felt as active and energetic and interested in every little detail surrounding him as possible. He then enrolled in online courses and watched many youtube videos and bought many books on how to get bored, ending up building a certain level of competence on the subject, so much so that, after just a few weeks, he himself could create an online course or write a book on how to get bored, a three-hundred-page book if necessary, or even longer than that, and this would immediately gain him the status of expert in boredom. He could have done that, making a ton of money, and forgetting once and for all about fiction writing. He would launch a podcast too. It all sounded like the perfect plan -- so inspired, so devious, yet so simple. But then one night he dreamed again of the old man. This time he looked quite upset and said: what the fuck are you doing? Or maybe he didn’t say it so explicitly, but that was the bottom line. At which point the young writer woke abruptly and, as if moved by a strange calling, went to check his email inbox, where he found a mail from an unknown address with a blank subject. When he opened it, the body of the mail contained the phrase: what the fuck are you doing? Typed in helvetica, bold and italics. He then went to the bathroom and when he switched on the light and went to the mirror, he found a phrase handwritten on it in red lipstick saying: what the fuck are you doing? It was a dark red lipstick, almost black. Flustered, he dressed and got ready to go out to get the paper, and when he put his hands in the pockets of his coat, his left pocket to be precise, he retrieved a yellow post-it with a phrase written on it in longhand, saying: what the fuck are you doing? The calligraphy resembled that of his uncle Thomas, round and regular, but he knew that it wasn’t his. At this point he realized that maybe the universe wanted to tell him something, maybe there was a message for him lingering in the air that he wasn’t quite catching. Then, his phone rang. A voice on the other end said hi this is Penguin Random House, we heard that you know about boredom and its effects on creativity more than anybody else in the world, so we would like to publish a book by you on the subject; would you be interested? He didn’t know what to say, so he said the easiest thing he could come up with, which was yes, I would. We even thought of a few alternative titles, which are preliminary of course, just an idea, the voice continued, tell us what you think: Atomic Boredom, or The 4-Hour Boredom Week, or The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck about Boredom (the voice said F*ck with the asterisk). His head started to spin and he passed out, the voice on the phone saying hello, hello, are you there? When he regained consciousness, he found himself in a white room, a man whose age must have been a thousand years, with a long white beard, seated in front of him. Who are you, the young writer asked. I’m Saint Peter, or San Pietro in Italian, if you prefer, and I’m here to ascertain whether to send you to heaven, purgatory, or hell, because, you know, he continued, everybody thinks that heaven, purgatory, and hell are fantasy constructs invented by Dante Alighieri, but they’re wrong: they really exist. Oh, the young writer said, more as a way to interject and show some interest than anything else.
Suddenly, Jude realized that it was the break of dawn and stopped writing. And he thought that the story he had just written was probably bad, disarticulated, syntactically inhomogeneous, grammatically wrong, and uninteresting.
But it was true and indisputable.
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Silvio! I was literally cry-laughing by the time we got to the bathroom mirror message . . .
Brilliant. Deep, meta, full of wisdom, but also hilarious. I smiled and grinned and laughed.
Now I'm going to read it again.