Quote and Comment, Robinson

Marilynne Robinson wrote in the New York Times Book Review on 24 Sept. 2017: “Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.”

True. Even if we do try, we try in vain to explain instead of explore. And every time we find it to be so, that whatever we imagined producing is altered by the act of putting it in language – which is always different, always something else, and always better than what we fancied our wits might conjure. It is indeed a delight to be one’s first reader.