"I am like a tight-rope dancer who in the midst of his performances should suddenly discover that he knows nothing about tight-rope dancing"

“I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours, I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. …

I assure you – speaking soberly and on my word of honour – that sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking that baby and alarming my wife. It’s no joking matter. After such crises of despair I doze for hours half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again – and at last go to bed completely done-up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. I haven’t read for days. You know how bad it is when one feels one’s liver, or lungs. Well I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid – in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there – to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it no more than you can grasp a handful of water. “

Joseph Conrad in a letter to Edward Garnett (husband to Constance).
P424-5 of Joseph Conrad: Three Lives by Frederick Karl, FSG 1979

According to Karl, in the days after his first child had been born, before he started writing "Youth" and The Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad struggled to make progress in his novel, The Rescuer, and "began to split into pieces." "One result," Karl writes, "was the emergence of Marlow... Conrad’s route toward the discovery of Marlow is mysterious; we really do not know precisely how or why he came to depend on this figure. Nevertheless, his next three works all used Marlow in varying degrees of dependency."

"O les beaux jours!"

The first time I saw Beckett’s Happy Days I was sitting in French class in front of a wheeled tv-vcr unit that our high school called a “multimedia cart.” It was the spring of my senior year, after the AP exams; the certainty that high school would soon be behind us had exaggerated our ironic detachment from academics. That day, our French teacher, who had wanted all her life to be an actress instead of a French teacher, played us a video of her performance as Winnie, showing us her life on the stage, buried up to her waist and then to her neck, chattering and smiling frantically.

We snickered, I think, yet it was a traumatic moment: a vision of hell, as a place not of endless light or timelessness, but a place where your finest performance of the person you believe yourself to be ends up passing as comedy for the amusement of people who will forget you.

"Where John Henry Fell Dead"

John Henry had a little woman,
The dress that she wore was red,
She went down the track and she never came back,
Said she was going where John Henry fell dead.

There was a time in my life when I listened to a lot of old songs, dirt music, folk, blues, shape-note singing, and believed in a strange theory: that the fact that “red” and “dead” rhymed, the fact that that the line “went down the track” demanded that “she never came back,” that “blue” and “you” were inseparable meant that in spite of the utopia we thought we were promised in words, we were doomed by the rhymes and inner harmonies of our common language to live out the same old sad songs.

I know now that there are many authors of our doom, and fates that the finest machinations of language cannot escape.