People who write are basically miserable. Why? It’s partly because they’re spies & traitors, always taking down notes and using people for material. Betraying them by fixing them with words, as you would pin a butterfly. There’s an extent to which writing kills by fixing things.
Graham Greene is a great example of the author as spy and traitor, which was connected to his obsession with infidelity. The misery also derives from the need to put things into words, which is a desire to capture the uncapturable.
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You know, things like what your last girlfriend’s broach looked like the night you first met her or the smell in your school classroom. Healthy people let these things flow by. It is the neurotic who wants to fix and reexperience these things, preserve them so they are not lost.
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This neurotic desire is an avoidance of reality. Proust is the best example of this, writing away in his cork lined room and expecting to die every minute. The more pathological writers fix their unhappiness and despair in words, forcing themselves to re-experience it.
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The neurosis can also manifest in world-building of the fantastical sort. A surprising number of authors write because they don’t like the world, Burroughs said this. They build a world they can inhabit.
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This can lead to drinking or drug taking as a means to escape neurosis—the desire to escape reality, and also to escape the miserable neurotic re-experience of reality.
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