Saturday, September 17, 2005

"I write, my wife does everything else."

What Mario Vargas Llosa found here is no news to me.

Yet there was one sentence in this interview with Mario Vargas Llosa:
"I write - my wife does everything else."

I do everything, writing included.
True, nowadays, with children grown up and on their own, I have, in theory, the freedom to do just the writing.


Except that - how can one write when hungry.
I get up and do the cooking.
How can one cook, when the kitchen is empty.
I go out and do the shopping, bills have to be paid and settled on time, money has to be raised - to buy food and cover the bills, too much dust is bad for your lungs, the floors must be washed...

I can stop all activities for a whole month - I cannot stop the sense of heavy burden.

Dacia Maraini, whom I've visited with in Italy for my "Noffey Haneffesh" (Once She Was a Child), does have a secretary, agents, help. Yet she did the cooking for the fourteen guests at the party in the evening.

Even before a woman takes a pen in her hand, she's, most of the time, handycapped.

The only place where a measure of freedom exists, or rather responsibility is for a while lifted - is at the artists' colony. It's called a retreat, only that one finds it hard to retreat while surrounded by twenty or fifty energetic writers and artists day and night.

No doubt - having a wife to do "everything else", is a good idea.

I won't exchange my full freedom for anything else.

The sense of responsibility feels like a great burden only in memory. It shouldn't be that terrible when one is responsible only for one's own life.

Like a freed slave, the greatest task is to erase the imprint left by years of slaving to responsibilities.

This book I've been writing since December 2000, am still working on - my fifth - brings new revelations daily.

Writing is such an irresponsible adventure!

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