Uitgelezen 7

‘There always comes a moment in the writing of a book when its purpose is revealed: the moment when the urge – Nabokov’s famous ‘throb’– that led one to consider writing it is made plain. Actually there are two moments, or, if it makes sense to put it like this, the moment comes in two phases. First when one realizes that yes, there is a book here – however faintly it can be discerned – not just a haphazard collection of jottings and crossings-out clustered round an inadequately formed idea. Since, in principle, getting to that point should be easy, it’s disheartening to find that so much time and energy have to be wasted, that so many pointless detours, irritating obstacles, self-imposed tests and excurses (that voice constantly whispering or crying out ‘Stop!’) conspire to get in the way. (…)
The next moment comes not when the book is finished – that is better conceived as the last bit of the previous phase – but some time after it is published, when you see it for what it is (…). Then you see that actually those big desires and hopes, your deepest wishes, turned out not to be so deep at all, that actually even to consider life and writing in terms of a single wish is absurd, that there are numerous wishes and numerous books to be written (…) There’s no Room, or at least this one, this room, wasn’t it. And so one sets off again, trying to find another.’
[Geoff Dyer, Zona, p. 185-186.]