Faith seeking understanding, my personal journey towards a deeper knowledge of and intimacy with God, the cosmos, humanity and myself through thoughts, words and (occasionally) images, is a series of [hopefully] daily reflections I’m writing with the purpose of publishing something on a regular basis for others to read, either here, at joncarllewis.com or among my writings at Medium.com.
I am rereading Elaine Dundy’s chapter about me from the memoir that she is writing. I am reminded what a good comic writer she is; she also has a biographer’s sharp eye. For instance, she writes that while my clothes are never noticeable, Ken wears deep purple suits and Tom Wolfe’s white planter outfits are very showy indeed. They dressed to be noticed. I dressed to be invisible. But perhaps that is the difference between journalists, obliged to make a vivid daily effect, and those of us who write over the long haul, revealing, even in our clothes, the slow, dull, bovine temperament of the novelist.
—Gore Vidal, Palimpsest, p. 313.
Obscurity. It is what the writer fears most of all. Or at least most writers. Or, at least, me. Deep down, I want to be noticed, famous, lauded, preferably for my writing and, barring that, for my ideas (although I can think of few better ways to be lauded for one’s ideas than by putting them in print and publishing them). Nevertheless, as an aspiring novelist, I have come to recognize a paradox: in order to become famous as a novelist, one must spend an inordinate amount of time in obscurity.
Continue reading “Faith seeking understanding #070: On the necessity of obscurity for fame”
