The Torturer's Horse Scratches It's Innocent Behind

The torturer’s horse scratches it’s innocent behind on a tree….The old masters: how well they understood the human position: how it takes place when someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

On this fine cool morning, all is still. Even the birds are quiet and a low-lying fog blankets the downward slope of the farm and drifts across the pond and through the trees. It feels like a Thoreau morning, and I wonder at all he saw and felt. I think of all those who came before and all they knew and wish I could offer one of them a cup of coffee and a seat on my porch as I put on my own horrible sneakers.

These are some of my favorite lines from literary masters of old. Can you guess who they are?

1. "About suffering, they were never wrong."

2. "Tell the truth, but tell it slant."

3. "A novel is a mirror walking along a main road."

4. "A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

5. "A writer’s material is what he cares about."

6. "Literature thrives on taboos.”

7. "Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it."

8.  "It's not wise to violate the rules until you know how to observe them.”

9. "No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

10. "I've led a good rich sexual life and I don’t see why it should be left out.”

11. "I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in  my

       own horrible sneakers."

So write of taboos-leave nothing out- and be wary of who you show your drafts to. Balance on a limb and fabricate. Observe the world carefully and don’t be afraid to write what you are passionate about. Hang a piece of art, arrange a bouquet, and write a sentence that fills a page. Be prepared to suffer.

1. Auden

2. Dickinson

3. Stendhal

4. Lichtenberg

5. Gardner

6. Burgess

7. Thoreau

8. Eliot

9. Wells

10. Miller

11. Parker

The opening quote is from Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts

Why am I Reading Three Books at Once?

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.
- Walter Bagehot

Now in all fairness I must say I don’t know who Walter Bagehot is, and my first inclination at reading this quote was to say—What? Have you not been to your local library lately? Who are you and how dare you talk so dismissively about the throes of writing anything! What do you, Walter Bagehot, know?

Then I looked at the current stack of library books competing with my uncompleted income tax returns for attention and wondered . . . why am I reading three books at once?

I started the first novel (highly acclaimed by review) with high expectations but couldn’t get through the laborious, over-written prologue. So I set it aside and started novel # 2 but soon found myself flipping through to the end of chapter one. Now this is death to a writer. To have a reader thumbing through your first chapter? Dear Lord! This is the dreaded sharpie-taken-to-your-manuscript in any respectable writer’s circle! So, how did novel #2 get past a writer’s group and an agent and an editor to become published? With lowered expectations I started novel #3 with its cleaver title and intriguing book jacket copy written to lure me in. I skimmed through the first five pages that every writer knows is paramount to success, waiting to be hooked. But sometimes it takes ten or twenty or even fifty pages to be hooked and I'm a patient reader, so I plodded ahead, only to be introduced to character after character I feared I would care nothing about. In fact, I knew every detail of their predictable lives before each was revealed and cared not a whit for any of it.

And so they sit, on top of my yet-to-be-filed income tax returns as I browse through my own bookshelves for old dog-eared paperbacks and so-called classics which might be nothing more than books written by people who knew things.

So, Walter Bagehot, whoever you are, I offer my apologies.