Once set on that path of recognition, we cannot forswear our integral connections with other people. It is painful but if we are to be come human, we cannot abandon it. This effort to recognize is an effort to connect ourselves with the reality of our own lives. It is an effort carried out against formidable enemies: habit inertia the fear of change and what it will entail the wish to preserve our idiot corners of safety, of being "right" and self righteousness - the most dangerous enemy of all, full of a terrible energy that would turn us away from pondering the mystery of existence towards its own barren pleasures. In this sense, thought is the effort to recognize. By thought, I mean that preoccupation with what we feel and why we feel it, and the enormous effort we must make to educe from a tangle of impressions and fleeting images the nature of those feelings. All such victories are, I believe, transient. Because a major effort of writing is reflection, which is silent and solitary, I place thought under the heading of the experiences I had while I was writing The Slave Dancer.īy thought, I do not mean the marshalling of one's intellectual forces to refute an argument or to bring about a temporary victory over what agitates and bewilders us. And the original intention - that first sudden stirring of one's imagination - is made up of many small, almost always humble, things. Nearly all the work of writing is silent.
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