For years, I’ve been sharing paeans — verbal descriptions (or, really, verbal creep shots) of beautiful women I encounter. A few months ago, one of these went badly wrong — the woman about whom I was writing became aware I was writing about her, and was grossed out/offended/scared/threatened/impinged/violated.
I felt awful.
I feel – even months later – awful.
This was coupled with my Dark Ages. And I’ve been much more… restrained, constrained… in my writing generally, and in my writing paeans, in particular, in the time since those Dark Ages began, and this event occurred, in particular.
I’m going to take a hiatus, for a bit, from paeans, and replace them with a new trope: wisdom from others – wise things I encounter in my reading, listening, and so on.
Item #1: This, from Adam Phillips’s Monogamy (a great book, an easy read, and lots of fun):
There are fundamentally two kinds of writer, just as there are two kinds of monogamist: the immaculate and the fallible. For the immaculate every sentence must be perfect, every word the inevitable one. For them, getting it right is the point. For the fallible, ‘wrong’ is only the word for people who need to be right.