I just read Padgett Powell’s marvelous essay Breathing the Same Air as Genius in the May 2003 issue of The Oxford American in which he recounts a trip to Andalusia that included spending time with Flannery O’Connor’s cousin and literary executor Louise Florencourt. (http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2013/may/28/issue-47-breathing-same-air-genius/)
Powell describes the bedroom where O’Connor wrote thus:
The desk is not a foot from the bed, about wheelchair-heave distance, that distance you lift yourself from one conveyance to another without walking.
I look around, sitting as I am in my Harrisburg home’s library in a comfortable armchair at a proper ergonomically designed desk and working on a laptop with software that has removed many of the barriers to clean, spell-checked prose and feel shame - shame that I haven’t written more when the tools at my disposal remove every excuse. Not to mention that I am not afflicted with a serious disease such as the one that left O’Connor with only enough energy to write two hours per day. But write she did, from the first floor bedroom.
June approaches and I am, frankly, more than a little shaken. Powell asks why one goes to a writer’s house and answers his question with a quote from Good County People. He answers his question with another - thus -
If you could breath the same air over the same ground, could you draft in the mind of a genius?
Why else indeed?
Today's word count - 167
No comments:
Post a Comment