The Power of Reading, from Steve McCurry’s blog
I love so many things about this picture. Truly the photographers have us over a barrel. It'd take me a thousand words or more.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
– Jorge Luis Borges
Here, somewhere in the electric snap and fizzle I feel in my brain when I look at McCurry's image...here is why I write. The insatiable urge to dive headlong into the grimy guts of something, to name it, to call it what it is, overtakes me. The odds of my touching on the truth of the matter? Slim. The degree to which I will most assuredly fail? Vast. The compulsion to try? Irrevocably unstoppable.
Writing is, in the end, a maternal instinct. To call something you love by name. I will make no excuses for my poor parenting, but it is not in me to give up.
So, despite being mid-long into the sticky tarpits a new draft of a new book and already behind and already tired...I look at this photograph and my heart hurts at the beauty, the hilarity, the absurdity of the world. No, I will not give up. Not yet. Neither should you, my darlings.
In the immortal words of a terrible tyrant of vast intelligence:
"Write, damn you. What else are you good for?"
