Thursday, January 05, 2012
The Temptations of Authorship
Michael Littleton was a very devout Christian whose lens of piety and understand was ground and polished in centuries following the Reformation. I, a young student, naive, was afflicted with a form of pride in that I desperately desired to utter or author something uniquely profound. I was like a moth drawn to a flame and the closer I approached the more beautiful it became and the more intensely I suffered its damaging effects. I think Mr. Littleton was displeased with my pride and self-will or willfulness that I wanted to turn in a poem rather than an essay but he respected my freewill choice. My desire for wisdom and profundity, perhaps misguided, almost destroyed me in my Sophomore year. I had to go to Dean Keefer and ask for a week or two leave of absence to return home and get myself together. As best as I can recall, I began to suspect that I had achieved some unique vision or gift or insight and I became paranoid that others were envious. I suppose we read such books as "great books" with the hope of truly understanding them and perhaps in a new way, and we may secretly desire to one day write something of our own. There were people at college who were kind to me during my affliction and there were others who thrive upon suffering who were not so kind or compassionate. I suppose what complicated all of this was that I was a virgin and a part of me felt ashamed of my status and a part was afraid to change that status. I remained a virgin until age 30, long after I had left the Greek monastery in Brookline and was living in the Hotel Essex in Boston across from South Station Amtrak, near Summer St. and Atlantic I think. And then one evening, June 7, 1979, I suddenly decided at sunset to walk to a street I had never seen and there was a used bookstore which was not supposed to be open but the owner had left a young woman without the keys to lock up, and I entered and saw a copy of "The Haunted Bookshop" by Christopher Morley, and I turned to the beautiful young woman and said "You should read this because it is about a bookshop just like this." We married three months to the day after we met, and stayed married for 13 years and then divorced.
