The Failure of Writing

I was going to try to write something last night, but after a wonderful Christmas morning I was enraged at my sister, Becca, over stupid family drama so it didn't happen. This morning I bought ten books from Barnes and Noble and D.I., and anyone who knows me knows that having more books always sets my mind at ease (especially such titles as Love in the Time of Cholera, Writings of Oscar Wilde, Jane Eyre, Jacob's Room, Where Angels Fear to Tread, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Middlemarch, Sometimes a Great Notion, Lake Wobegon, and a hardcover For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yeah. Especially since I also received Shogun, The Chosen, and The Joy Luck Club as gifts yesterday. But despite this bolstering of my library I'm in a lazy mood and not feeling creative at all, so I'm wussing out and blogging an excerpt from the book I'm currently reading, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. It's a great quote, a little dense, but full of meaning and worth reading. It's applicable to any type of writing, including- and maybe especially- this blog:

Perhaps this diary will come to light many, many years after my death, when our language will have undergone who knows what transformations, and some of the words and expressions I use normally will seem outdated and of ambiguous meaning. In any case, the person who finds this diary will have one certain advantage over me: with a written language it is always possible to reconstruct a dictionary and a grammar, isolate sentences, transcribe them or paraphrase them in another language, whereas I am trying to read in the succession of things presented to me every day the world's intentions toward me, and I grope my way, knowing that there can exist no dictionary that will translate into words the burden of obscure allusions that lurks in these things. I would like this hovering of presentiments and suspicions to reach the person who reads me not as an accidental obstacle to understanding what I write, but as its very substance; and if the process of my thoughts seems elusive to him who, setting out from radically changed mental habits, will seek to follow it, the important thing is that I convey to him the effort I am making to read between the lines of things the evasive meaning of what is in store for me.