Little events, ordinary things

Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house---the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture---must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

~ Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things, 1997

The struggle with writing is over

“The struggle with writing is over.”

Those are the words written on a post-it by Philip Roth’s computer screen. In an interview, Roth said that looking at the note every day gives him strength.  It made me wonder how it would feel like if I, too, would stop articulating my thoughts.  And so I did: I stopped writing.  For the past several weeks, I restrained myself from updating my blog. 

Knowing that I don’t have to struggle with writing anymore brought me such relief, but choosing not to struggle was a struggle in itself.  Suppressed and stultified, the need to write always threatened to overwhelm me, and now it finally did.