The Third of March

I did a lot of things today.
Well, really, I do a lot of things erryday, but today, I did things of seeming significance. I got a new bicycle. It is a Peugeot, from the early nineties, and is pink and purple. It's really smooth, and I am very pleased with it for the 65E I payed. I also wrote a letter, an activity that I have remained celibate from for the majority of my life, but that I find infinitely rewarding. I am currently getting ready to finish up the novel "The Hidden Force" by Louis Couperus- an amazing work of vivid detail that almost (almost) borders on dreadfully slow due to his expansive pros in concern the smallest whims of scenery. However, Couperus makes a great statement in his introduction that I would like to reflect on, for you, my attentive, studious audience. His statement is this-

"I no longer write novels because I have become so deliciously lazy.. and when I was writing them I simply couldn't be lazy. Because a novel is something horrible! That is a labor for Hercules! (He has a novel on Hercules that was released in 1913) That is a job to drive you mad! That is building Babel (His novel on this came out in 1901) with towers and staircases ascending! That is to create worlds and found cities! That breeding entire families, with grandmas and great grandmas, and grandchildren down to I don't know which umpteenth generation! (as he had done on three occasions in Of Old People, The Things That Pass, and The Books of the Small Souls) Writing a novel is being everything, our Lord, and a human being at the same time. That is being architect, painter, doctor, paperhanger, tailor, linguist, stylist, and much more. An author of a novel must have known and seen everything, even if it was in his own imagination! He must know how a city or a village is built, how winter cedes into spring, and how first love in his heart for his heroin gives way to the second and third, how an omelet is cooked and how a child is born! Because if he does not know all of this, and much more, he is liable to make the silliest mistakes, on each page, in each sentence...."

Now, the Dutch born, Indie dwelling writer goes on about this at length, so I will cut him off there, at a point where you have, without a doubt, gotten the general point of his exasperation.
This passage ends with a twist though.

".. I am incapable of doing anything else but write.. so I bagan to write again. There were several pens on my desk, a lyrical one, an epic and historical one, there was an allegorical, a symbolic, an idealistic, and a naturalistic one, a realistic and an impresssionistic pen, I believe that there were even four or five more..."

This, my kind reader, is the ailment that I have, somewhat intentionally, fallen upon. I begin to write in one of my stories, my countless pages of nothing but stage directions and introspective catch phrases, and realize that writing is a labor. The pen must be physically pushed across the page, the hand guided by the mind, and the mind reacting to some unknown drive train that is what I label as the self. And as soon as I am in the story, living, breathing, thinking as my creation, I sadly realize how juvenile I am, how ignorant I must be to set a story in Greece, in the Future, in the Distant Past, how unlearned I must be to assume the role of a poor boy, having never missed a meal without forethought. And yet, after I cane myself mentally for expanding at length upon vast oceans of occurrences I have never and will never know or understand, I pick the pen back up, and begin again, describing in detail and simultaneously in vain, how the blood of my murdered lover runs red as cadmium down the dry yellow grass, under a fig tree, atop a small hill on the ancient island of Cypress.
This is how I pass my days, playing God with a pen and a pad.