The power of the written word, via Grossman

Because the man's brilliant. And because I can't seem to stop my brain from automatically linking back to that which he's put into words so well. It is amazing, isn't it, when someone is able to fit words so perfectly to that which we've been thinking. ...I'm absurdly envious of this man's talent. Unspeakably appreciative, but envious nonetheless. One person insisted that I read this essay collection, and I feel the need to share the recommendation.


David Grossman, Writing in the Dark:


"To me, writing, the writing of literature, is partly an act of protest and defiance, and even rebellion, against this fear - against the temptation to entrench myself, to set up an almost imperceptible barrier, one that is friendly and courteous but very effective, between myself and others, and ultimately between me and myself.
...The more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being."


"I write, and I give my most private and intimate names to an external, unknown world. In some sense, I make it mine. So do I return from a land of exile and alienation - I come home. I change, just slightly, what previously seemed unchangeable. Even when I describe the cruelest arbitrariness that determines my fate - whether man-made or preordained - I suddenly find in it new subtleties and nuances. I find that simply writing about the arbitrariness lets me move freely in its presence. That the very fact of standing up against the arbitrariness gives me freedom - perhaps the only freedom man has against any kind of arbitrariness - the freedom to articulate the tragedy of my situation in my own words. The freedom to articulate myself differently, freshly, against the unbending dictates of arbitrariness that threaten to bind me and pin me down."


"In this world I have described, literature has no influential representatives in the centers of power, and I find it difficult to believe that literature can change it. But it can offer different ways to live in it. To live with an internal rhythm and an internal continuity that fulfill our emotional and spiritual needs far more than what is violently imposed upon us by the external systems."