Yesterday I made chicken soup and watched three kinds of television with Teenage Head Cold Monster until he finally fell asleep on the couch. Today I will edit, and stare aimlessly out the window at the snow, and worry about the sheaf of rejection letters I've just received, and then forget about them, and wonder who in the world is thinking of me, which may sound like a plea for a comment from you but isn't really. It's more like: do I exist or not? do you exist or not? are we chainsawed stumps in a mangled forest that is slowly vanishing under the snow? or will those sharp crocus leaves poke up through the frozen slush after all? Just the usual dreamy late-winter rhetoric. You know.
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With regard to your existence, "Occupation is essential," says Virginia Woolf, "by way of advising other Virginias" in separate journal entries over seventy years ago. "I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down." And, again, "Seldom have I been more completely miserable than I was about 6:30 last night, reading over the last part of The Years. Such feeble twaddle--such twilight gossip it seemed; such a show up of my own decrepitude, and at such huge length. I could only plump it down on the table and rush upstairs with burning cheeks to L. he said: "This always happens." But I felt, No, it has never been so bad as this. I make this note should I be in the same state after another book. Now, this morning, dipping in, it seems to me, on the contrary, a full, bustling live book..."
I don't know anyone who can better capture a writer's fluctuations of confidence and panic about her work. This is such an exact description.
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