Sunshine!

This is how absent-minded I can be sometimes: I will buy a book, and enjoy it—love it, even!—and then lose it, or think I’ve lost it. And so I buy another copy.

And then I find the first copy hiding somewhere. 

Of course.

This most recently happened with Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease, a book I’ve mentioned before—it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read on writing.

And so, yesterday I was happy to find the older copy, the long-lost friend, and I leafed through it, looking at Flaherty’s words and my various marginal notations, and I came across a puzzling one:

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The photo is sadly blurry. There is a wavy line around a paragraph, and above it a little sort-of circle with lines emerging
from it—a dandelion seed, maybe, or a bacteria. It took me a while, but then I realized, no—it’s the sun!  For
next to it I wrote: “Sunshine!”

Here’s the passage I was commenting on:

I strain my nerves for the faintest sense of the feeling I should write, the feeling that my feet are starting to lift off the ground. Although I sit down to write every day at five in the morning, on the days when my muse has left me, I can no longer pretend to sit down because I am in control of the situation. I am not writing but doing penance for all the days when the muse spoke and I failed to listen (87).

Sunshine!  Right?

I do like this passage. I’m not a muse-man, but sometimes writing does indeed feel like penance.  I love this book.