True Story
“Far behind the eye the quest begins.” — Samuel Beckett, “Ill Seen Ill Said”
It’s the ones who suffer who sit in their rooms alone and write, suffering, alone, feeling the need to share their suffering and loneliness with others who may or may not sit in their rooms, suffering, alone, whether or not they feel the need to write or just sit in their rooms, suffering, alone, it’s this lack of others who understand suffering and loneliness that the sufferers and the lonely want most to bring an end to, writing about their suffering, their loneliness, to connect with others who suffer as they do, alone, so they write, sharing their suffering and loneliness with the others who sit suffering and alone, waiting to read about someone else’s suffering and loneliness as a way of ending their own suffering and loneliness, perhaps if they too write about their suffering and loneliness, alone in their rooms, suffering and lonely, others too will want to read about their suffering and loneliness as a way of ending their suffering and loneliness, but when they write it isn’t their suffering and loneliness they’re writing about, it’s fiction, it’s someone else, they’ve fictionalized their suffering and loneliness as someone else’s suffering and loneliness, someone who may resemble them but is most definitely not them, no, not their suffering and lonely self, not exactly, no one could suffer and be as alone as that without wanting to end it all, could they, they may be suffering and lonely but they’re not suffering and lonely that much, although others may be, others suffering, lonely, alone in their rooms, all this suffering, all this loneliness, fictionalized, transformed into universality, the blue river of the truth of suffering and loneliness running deeply through it all, writers and readers alike, all their suffering and loneliness, whether real or fictional, individual or universal, and the sheer absolute shuddering joy of writing and reading about it.
