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Maybe the crazy weather has had something to do with it — bitterly frigid one day, almost balmy the next — never knowing if one would wake to sunlight or to ice and wind-driven sleet and snow.
In speaking of a working life, of course, “hard” is an all but meaningless adjective. Sitting in a padded chair, looking for words and causing them to appear on paper … that’s hard?
Nonsense! In the whole of a writing career there’s been nothing that begins to compare in hardness to what was asked of my parents, and probably of yours, in providing for a family during punishing and often unjust times.
My father, whose name was Hugh, had a day job in an office. The pay was small, the danger of layoffs great and nearly constant.
He also had an egg route, buying crates of them — 40 dozen or more — from farmers in the country and making deliveries to customers in the neighborhood.
In the Christmas seasons he had a night job, unloading boxcars at the rail yard, coming home at midnight or after, then rising again at 6 a.m. to do it all again.
My mother, Dorothy, in spite of uncertain health that troubled her nearly her whole adult life, worked for some years as a secretary in a hospital ward.
Remembering their life stories and their courage, I’m ashamed of my whining. And counting my luck, I turn then for encouragement, as I always have, to books — though not to current ones.
Of course there are many splendid works by contemporary writers, and neglecting them surely is my loss. I understand that. But as with old friends, it’s the ones I’ve known longest that I depend on.
I can list a few of them here. Moby-Dick (Melville); Walden (Thoreau); Look Homeward, Angel (Thomas Wolfe); Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald); A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway); The Pastures of Heaven (Steinbeck); The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner); and a less-well-known but immensely powerful and still-relevant novel, Darkness at Noon by Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler.
There are others, many others, for between us, in this house we share, there are some 2,000 books, more of them my wife’s than mine. But those are the principal touchstones.
Of the books I turn to regularly, only one, Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey, not a novel but a collection of essays, could be called at all recent.
And what inspiration do I find in them?
Just this. All are products of the unending struggle to master the craft. Some even were created during times of great personal hardship.
Writing isn’t easy. There’s no reason to imagine it should be. And too often, one’s best effort falls short.
But to read the very best is to be reminded once again of the point of trying.
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