Writing in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

demarcation between friends, even “best friends” or true soul mates. Even in the deepest, longest, and most loyal friendships, a thin barrier is sometimes detectable—a refusal to know everything, a form of protection, transparent but solid, from that unseen darkness within our best friend.
    I recall the tragicomic dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot . “I had a dream,” says Estragon. “Don’t tell me!” Vladimir immediately retorts. “Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you?” Estragon asks. “Let them remain private,” replies Vladimir.
    On second thought, perhaps the unwillingness—the fear?—to be exposed to the complexities of people close to us should not be so surprising, for experience teaches us that people are rarely eager to be truly exposed even to what exists within themselves . Perhaps our attempt to avoid being fully exposed to the Other is not so different from the efforts we make—almost inadvertently—to resist being tempted by all the varied “others” within each of us. To keep from crumbling into all the options of existence and the internal temptations, all the forking paths within us. Who can measure the vast efforts we make to maintain these rigid internal frameworks, to preserve the bands that grasp—and sometimes shackle—our many-faceted, oft-deceptive souls?

    I will add that I often feel that writing has shown me the enormous effort I continually make, often unconsciously, to resist falling apart into all the possibilities, all the many characters and entities, all the qualities and urges and instincts that act within me, well suppressed yet still pulling me constantly in all directions.
     
     
    We human beings are uneasy about what truly occurs deep inside the Other, even if that Other is someone we love. And perhaps it is more than unease; perhaps it is an actual fear of the mysterious, nonverbal, unprocessed core, that which cannot be subjected to any social taming, to any refinement, politeness, or tact; that which is instinctive, wild, and chaotic, not at all politically correct. It is dreamlike and nightmarish, radical and exposed, sexual and unbridled, at least according to the social-order definitions that prevail among “civilized” people (whatever that term may mean). It is mad and sometimes cruel, often animalistic, for good or for bad. It is, if you will, the magma, the primordial, blazing material that bubbles inside every person simply because he is human, simply because he is an intersection of so many forces, instincts, longings, and urges. It is a magma that usually, among sane people—even the most tempestuous—hardens and cools when it comes into contact with air, when it encounters other human beings, or the confines of reality, and then it becomes part of “normative” social fiber.
    To me, writing, the writing of literature, is partly an
act of protest and defiance, and even rebellion , against this fear—against the temptation to entrench myself, to set up an almost imperceptible barrier, one that is friendly and courteous but very effective, between myself and others, and ultimately between me and myself.
    I wish to clarify again that the primary urge that motivates and engenders writing, in my view, is the writer’s desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself . But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him . To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being.
    This may be something we cannot achieve by any other means. We tend to think that when we merge completely with another person, in moments of love and sexual contact, we know that person in an incomparable way. In biblical Hebrew the sexual act is even connoted with the verb “to know”: “And the man knew Eve his