Love and Laughter

Yesterday I went into a soapbox-lecture rant, shall we say? (yes, let’s — rants seem to be another thing that’s done a lot), about some of the comments to a recent post on Nathan Bransford’s blog.

At the end of every week, Bransford posts a “This Week in Publishing” entry summing up recent industry news and often alluding to the conversation on his own blog. Yesterday’s “This Week,” naturally, referred to the hypothetical questions he’d posed earlier — and to the answers, answers, answers, answers it elicited. And one of the mini-conversations resulting from the “This Week” post caught my eye.

It took place between someone identifying herself as Thomma Lynn, and someone with the moniker “a paperback writer” (evocative, for those of us Of A Certain Age). In the midst of a lot of hard-eyed appraisals of the harsh realities of art, the harsher realities of business, the naivete of writing newcomers, and the thick skins of writing veterans, Thomma Lynn and a paperback writer suddenly found themselves talking about — of all things — love:

TL: …don’t write for money, and don’t write for fame. And for goodness sake, don’t live for money, and don’t live for fame. Write for love. Live for love. In this all-too-short human life, love is the substance, and everything else is gravy.

pbw: …not every writer can write or live for love. At the risk of sounding like an amateur psychologist, I’ll say that writing, like other things, may very well be a substitute for this human craving (for both love and immortality).

TL: …By “love”, I meant “for the love of writing”, more of a joie de vivre thing, being in love with life, doing what you love and loving what you do.

(The above elides their comments considerably, and unfairly. The entire thread begins here on Bransford’s blog.)

So I read that thoughtful side-chat and went about my business. Which includes, as it often does, catching up with the week’s chucklings from the current over the rocks at whiskey river. And that’s where I found this:

So you’ll know me

The one thing I will tell you
So you’ll know me
Precisely
When you look for me in the
Crowd of all those faces
Those many, many faces
Which always move back and forth like
The Sea,
Is that I will look nothing like
What you expect me to
Look like.
Do not doubt it, it will work
You will find me, just as surely
As you always find that right turn
Onto your street, when you are coming
Home from work.
Right there, at the intersection between
This avenue and that avenue
As you take that turn
Effortlessly
That’s how you will know me.
I will look like none of those faces,
And I will feel precisely like
That right turn.

(by Corina Bardasuc)

A love poem, right? Sure. But following, as it did, on the heels of Thomma Lynn’s and a paperback writer’s comments, I recognized in it also the comments of a story, to its writer. And it stopped me cold.

Fortunately, after a moment’s pause I then scrolled back and found this, too:

Something marvelous has happened to me. I was caught up into the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods in assembly. As a special grace, there was accorded to me the privilege of making a wish.

“Wilt thou,” said Mercury, “wilt thou have youth, or beauty, or power, or long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any other glorious thing among the many we have here in the treasure chest? Then choose but one thing.”

For an instant, I was irresolute, then I addressed the gods as follows: “Highly esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.”

There was not a god that answered a word, but they all burst out laughing. Thereupon, I concluded that my wish was granted, and I found that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste.

(by Soren Kierkegaard)

Fortified thusly, from three different directions at once, then, then I could finally turn to the day’s work.