Effete Musings

      Writers are forced to live in extreme poverty. It might even be a cliche to mention it at this point. Sometimes writers are so poor that they can’t even afford places to live and are forced to spend all their time on public transportation to keep out of the cold. This is why there are so many people on buses reading Tolstoy and scribbling notes to themselves. These people may often be mistaken for lunatics, but they aren’t lunatics, as long as they are writing. As soon as pen touches paper, they become writers. They might be writers at other times as well because they might be doing research. Lunatics hardly ever write anything and rarely do research. They just walk around talking to themselves and to no real purpose. Whereas if a writer is talking to himself he is usually trying to compose a monologue.

        Writers also tend to eat very little. What money they have, they spend on booze. In wine there is truth or so the saying goes. Many writers have drunk a great deal of wine trying to find the truth at the bottom of the bottle, but instead they have only found the tannins. Let me propose a corollary statement to the other one: In a little wine is a little truth; in much wine is only headaches.

      Of course writers get hungry, but since they spend all their money on booze, they are forced to rely on the charity of their friends. Either that or they eat their boots. The great Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno was once mistaken for a lunatic when he allowed his boots to roast in a fire with his feet inside them. As it turns out he was just cooking his dinner and forgot his feet were still inside it.

      Writers are sickly and chaste. Flannery O’Connor spent all her time being sick and raising peacocks. She never had a boyfriend. Thoreau lived in the woods and kept his mother company. Writers hardly ever show up at dances or social functions. If a writer does happen to find an amorous passion brewing inside, he or she usually feels it so intensely that it turns into sickness. Otherwise writers are too sick to feel very amorous.

         Sickness is a kind of gift for writers. Only a writer would treasure feeling sick, anyone else would feel miserable and bored. Most writers discover a love for illness at an early age and their poverty helps them sustain it into adulthood. I once knew a writer who had a fever for five years. He was the happiest writer that ever lived. But finally his brains turned into mush and he died.