B000W93CNG EBOK Read Online Free PDF Page A

When the Danish aristocrat Wilhelm Dinesen shot birds all day, drank schnapps, napped, and dressed for dinner, he and his wife had three children under three. The middle one was Karen.)
    Like Stevens, Osip Mandelstam composed poetry on the hoof. So did Dante. Nietzsche, like Emerson, took two long walks a day. “When my creative energy flowed most freely, my muscular activity was always greatest…. I might often have been seen dancing; I used to walk through the hills for seven or eight hours on end without a hint of fatigue; Islept well, laughed a good deal—I was perfectly vigorous and patient.” On the other hand, A. E. Housman, almost predictably, maintained, “I have seldom written poetry unless I was rather out of health.” This makes sense too, because writing a book, you can be too well for your own good.
    Jack London claimed to write twenty hours a day. Before he undertook to write, he obtained the University of California course list and all the syllabi; he spent a year reading the textbooks in philosophy and literature. In subsequent years, once he had a book of his own under way, he set his alarm to wake him after four hours’ sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like The Sea-Wolf is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency—but you wouldn’t think a man would claim credit for it. London maintained that every writer needed a technique, experience, and a philosophical position. Perhaps the position need not be an airtight one; London himself felt comfortable with a weird amalgam of Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer (Marks & Sparks).
     
    My working the graveyard shift in Virginia affected the book. It was a nature book full of sunsets; it wholly lacked dawns, and even mornings.
    I was reading, among other things, Hasidism. If you stay awake one hundred nights, you get the vision of Elijah—the same revelation, earthquakeand all. I was not eager for it, although it seemed to be just around the corner. I preferred this: “Rebbe Shmelke of Nickolsburg, it was told, never really heard his teacher, the Maggid of Mezritch, finish a thought because as soon as the latter would say ‘and the Lord spoke,’ Shmelke would begin shouting in wonderment, ‘The Lord spoke, the Lord spoke,’ and continue shouting until he had to be carried from the room.”
    The second floor of the library, where I worked every night, housed the rare-book room. It was a wide, carpeted, well-furnished room. On an end table, as if for decoration, stood a wooden chess set.
    One night, stuck on an intractable problem in the writing, I wandered the dark library seeking distraction. I flicked on the lights in the rare-book room and looked at some of the books. I saw the chess set and moved white’s king’s pawn. I turned off the light and wandered back to my carrel.
    A few nights later, I glanced into the rare-book room, and walked in, for black’s queen’s pawn had moved. I moved out my knight.
    Every day, my unseen opponent moved. I moved. I never saw anyone anywhere near the rare-book room. The college was not in session; almost no one was around. Late at night I heard the night watchmen clank around downstairs in the dark. The watchmen never came upstairs. There was no one upstairs but me.
    When the chess game was ten days old, I entered the rare-book room to find black’s pieces coming toward me on the carpet. They seemed to be marching, in rows of two. I put them back as they had been, and made my move. The next day, the pieces were all pied on the board. I put them back as they had been. The next day, black had moved, rather brilliantly.
    Late one night, while all this had been going on, and while the library was dark and locked as it had been all summer, and I had accustomed myself to the eeriness of it, I left my carrel to cross the darkness and get a drink of water. I saw