Sunday, February 19, 2006

i live around the corner from "the hemingway"

Ernest Hemingway had a way with the written word that was incredible. Some might say his skill was indefinable, but that's exactly what it wasn't. It was precise—absolutely definable. Here for example is the text of his 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.
To write with such clarity and precision should be the goal of every writer, in any type of writing. The reason is this: in a world of such complexity and ambiguity, it becomes nearly impossible to lay out one's thoughts so that another can grasp some of the meaning of the first. It may, in fact, be entirely idealistic: romantic; utopian. For anyone avoid this and write so as to obfuscate is not merely dystopian, but ultimately dehumanizing. The point of all human existence, in case no one has told you, is to come together in any way possible. Writing is such a way. It gets close; then it penetrates.