R2E Excerpt #47*: The Rabbit Hole of Writing
It's so much easier to imagine writing great stuff than actually, um, writing it. WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE
JUST AFTER MY ARRIVAL IN PARIS, I received a letter from my thesis-novel advisor, who suggested that I take what I’d learned from that first novel and roll it over into my next. Over the course of a few days in early September, I conjured a main character—a librarian from Ohio—who takes a job at the New York Public Library and becomes obsessed with the sad, mad people who fill the Rose Reading Room with stink and imprecations against God. My main character was going to track them down and murder them all.
ApocalypticVisions ”R” Us.
I filled pages with scenes and chapter outlines and rapturous effusions along these lines: “A thought that called me from my drunken sleep: I choose to write. If each word means as much to me as the first and the last; then I will be able to live by my writing. Si vous êtes écrivain, ecrivez!”
If you’re a writer, write!
And so I did, page after page, about writing. About what I would write, one day. About how great it would be once I wrote it. “Art can elevate the commonplace to grandeur through the spring and liveliness of well chosen words. My traverse of the depths and heights of the city must be marked by no singular stroke of fate; for the stuff of daily living is grand enough, and low enough, for all the sensitive thoughts of mankind.”
Down writing’s rabbit hole I went.
Planning. Outlining. Imagining. Everything but writing, at that moment. And I worried about it. “Wherever we are heading, we are getting there fast,” I wrote. “But surely death is that unnamed destination, and I must drive my heels hard into the earth and arrest the speeding pace. We are allowed only one circumnavigation, and life ends, as it began, in nothingness. “
Why so serious?
In some sense, I had already died: Undergraduate education is a terminal disease. At the start the four years stretch ahead, unlimited-seeming. Then the years accumulate, time squeezes to a fine point, and after that, the dark (life). And I was afraid of the dark (life).
I had a horror of missing out, of being left behind, of being alone. My childhood included an element of abandonment. My eldest brother left home when I was ten, and college picked off another one every couple of years. My next older brother had been my roommate since I left the bassinet. When he went on to college I was a rising junior in high school, and anxiously spent my first night in a dark bedroom, alone.
I coped with abandonment by launching a frenzy of motion and engagement, which covered up for my lack of academic distinction when it came time for college. Accordingly I filled the days and nights of four years in wild activity, which came to a disconcerting end once I arrived back home, undergrad foolscap in hand.
Foolscap is a real thing: A size of paper you rarely see outside of a diploma, which you receive when you’re wearing a mortarboard, which is an impractical hat, except for tossing. The entire process is fraught with oddities. The word foolscap comes from the watermark—a jester’s cap and bells—applied by one of the early paper manufacturers, beginning in the 1500s. How appropriate, then, that receipt of that paper ends one kind of life, and requires you to create another. It’s a “bridge out” sign, not a ticket, and you have to find the detour-to-glory all by yourself. Time for fools to rush in.
The silence in my parents’ condo, the day after graduation, felt funereal.
Suddenly I had time to kill, and I feared that it might kill me.
To lend urgency to his otherwise empty life, the adolescent Graham Greene employed a six-chamber pistol, which he loaded with one bullet. “I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger,” he wrote. “There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities.”
To kill time before my own, more finite possibilities kicked in, in Paris and elsewhere, I read all 848 pages of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In those pages she included an indictment of nincompoops like me, and I duly copied our her warning as a reminder of my own ridiculousness: “Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dullness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of stupendous self and an insignificant world may have it’s consolations.”
Big difference: I was inflicted with a sense of stupendous world into which my insignificant self had tumbled. So I hoped to make my way in writing by expressing my general content with the universe.
I’m not sure that’s ever been done, even now. Who wants to read about somebody who’s actually happy and fulfilled? Those people deserve a smack, not a paycheck.
*On alternating weeks (or, alternately, when the mood strikes) I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or check out for my complete archive here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. Hey, kid, why don’t you head for England next?
R2E Excerpt #47*: The Rabbit Hole of Writing
Man, have I been there. Writing (and thinking, and pondering thinking) about writing. Glad you made it out alive!
I did not know you had this obsession about writing about writing. So funny.