When I first started this project in the form of a blog, I was thinking about the problem that the blog format presented, that the entries come up in reverse chronological order, with the newest ones at the top of the page. And then I thought about how reading the research backwards might actually be a fitting metaphor (I forget how, exactly).
At the moment I’m reminded of something that Ernest Hemingway once said in an interview regarding his novella, The Old Man and the Sea:
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better…. I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true. (“Books”)
I’m embarrassed to admit that I began this self-proclaimed “journey of errors” with much of the road already mapped out—or, at least, I had preconceived in my mind all the topics I wanted to touch on, all the quotes that would be fitting (the above one aside), all the artwork that I could bring in—all I needed was to go from one, to the next, to the next… and surely some grand, profound conclusion would be reached at the end.
And now I’m sitting in front of this computer screen (and have been for hours), and there are no such conclusions to be found. That’s the point, I think.
Being wrong means not writing the ending at the very start.
We’ll find out tomorrow what Howard Windsor thinks about that.
We’ll find out tomorrow what we think about that.
Works Cited
“Books: An American Storyteller.” Time 13 Dec. 1954. Web. 24 Nov. 2010.
"Being wrong means not writing the ending at the very start." Means "you set out thinking one thing will happen and another one does...."
ReplyDeleteThe journey matters. So too a form that gives you some scope for a journey. You've done that here.