to continue

An sms exchange with my friend F a few evenings ago after I received news of my promotion -

Me: I've been promoted and my unit made autonomous.

F: Congrats! Now you will never finish your book.

Me: I don't think I can do anything but to continue.

F: Then better sleep early and wake up early to write!

[It was 11.05 at night.]

Me: Continue living I mean.

*

                                                

F has said before that he has low expectations of people. It would seem, though, that he has rather high expectations of me as a writer.

In an interview the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that's that."

Her statement is what I would say too, about how one might continue being a writer without renouncing all the other aspects that constitute one's sense of a full encompassing life.

Mitsuko Uchida also said: "If there is a heaven - I'm not a Christian - and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, 'Musician.'"

This immediately brought to mind something similar that J, a dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, used to pronounce firmly, her voice strong and steady, her beautiful big eyes serious, bright, wide: "I was born a composer. I live as a composer. When I am dead, I want to be remembered as a composer."

We were a jovial coterie, all of us practitioners and teachers in the arts - visual arts, music, theatre, literature - and J's earnest declaration (which she reiterated a number of times over three years) was something we admired but also poked fun at mercilessly to her face.

Yet today, when I ask myself what my profession at the gate of heaven is going to be, two words come to mind: "Reader. Writer."

And what I have come to understand is that for the second to emerge and to continue, to be buoyant, the first must always be like a furiously flowing river.