I didn’t realise this until I looked at the website statistics, but with Mark’s last post, we have now reached 150 essays posted to The Essence of Water. Given that we’ll celebrate our three year anniversary in about six weeks, that’s pretty impressive – about one essay a week, on topics from money, to provincial French cities, to swimming in Ireland, to breaking free and learning to study philosophy – and all of it of a common theme, of existing as ethical, moral individuals.
Show, don’t tell
The standard advice given to aspiring writers of fiction is that they should concentrate on describing as best they can the characters, the settings, and the events, but should allow their readers to draw for themselves inferences about what this all means. Long before Roland Barthes pronounced la mort de l’auteur, teachers of good style had made clear that the novelist should not try to make explicit the significance of their books, but should trust their audience to join the dots, in their own time and in their own way, to complete the picture. The obligation of the novel, wrote Javier Cercas, more recently, is not to answer the question it poses but to formulate it in the most complex way possible.
Rites of passage
Right now, my son is looking for his iPad. After seeing him spend two hours watching train videos and play a game called “Township,” which involves spending large amounts of time loading trains with fruit, I told him “screen time is over” and then hid his iPad. It’s in the main entry hall of this ridiculous house – which appears, for those of you who are interested, in season three, episode one of Ozark, a Netflix series, where a squatter lives in this house and cooks on the same stove I use every night. I hid it behind a random work of art which is leaning on the overwrought concrete mantle of a fake fireplace. I doubt he’ll find it soon, but who knows. While he’s looking, I have a bit of spare time.
Wealth and privilege
I’m living in a Fellini film right now – alas, without the postwar Italian film stars and casual elegance, but with all of the absurdity, including the occasional unwanted bacchanal, bacchanals being particularly ill-suited to sheltering in place. But they happen nevertheless. I’m living in a palace by a lake, but it’s owned by a prince who feels unconstrained by commonplace rules, and every now and again he shows up in his Ferrari, accompanied by friends and family in Bentleys and Range Rovers, bringing platters of barbecue (the southern US equivalent of antipasti, I suppose), and proceeding to celebrate life with boats and jet skis and pool floaters and beer. As he is my patrone, I can only stand two meters away and encourage him, give him advice as to markets and contracts and the correct fuel mix on an inboard engine, and marvel.