Comments on: Inspiration Points: Death on my nightstand

By: Brielle

Brielle — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:16:34 +0000

I had to check – bedside table books: disturbing themes, one, curious themes, several (most are fortifying themes – not self-help, but spiritual)

I agree with Atwood. In fact, as soon as I read your opening sentence, “writing being about facing one’s own mortality”, I was engrossed because it’s something I have thought of often. It’s almost as though I’m working on my ‘death(comma)thou shalt die’ piece, and fear that it will never come. (something like that anyway).

I came across your blog on a google for ‘fragmented narrative’. Interesting post.

By: EBrown

EBrown — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:37:45 +0000

Memento Mori is one of my favorites. Both Spark and Atwood have been seminal in my thinking, for quite different reasons. I’m not sure, however, that I agree with Atwood that writers are memorializing in the sense of something fossilized or permanent. Writing as an action is not necessarily any more permanent than song or tale, both oral traditions. When Dickinson says “this is my letter to the World/that never wrote to me,” and places the paper in a trunk, she is coming from the momentous, i.e. from the immediate. She knows that the conversation may be unheard by the World: an unknown tree falling in an unseen forest, or as Marianne Moore described it “real toads in imaginary gardens.” Either pov can serve as the verge to observe ‘what fools these mortals be.’

By: Utisz

Utisz — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:01:41 +0000

Nice post.

By: Hellmut

Hellmut — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 17:36:00 +0000

I don’t have a nightstand but my book dealer once remarked with a smile that everyone else picked up Christmas books but I was buying an encyclopedia of assassination.

Memento Mori was, of course, an admonition to the victorious commander during his triumph in the streets of Rome. While the masses were cheering him one, the slave who held the laurels whispered constantly into the commander’s ears: “Remember, you are mortal.