Secure in the bay of his illness

The writer: someone who is most at home when (and in) writing. What makes someone a writer rather than, say, a philosopher who writes, is that his thoughts do not precede his writing. His writing reveals his ideas to him.

The experience the writer has is of his writing as a clearing
where he himself becomes visible.

Let's say this writer has been to a conference, a conference populated by speakers, by people who like speaking and know how to project their voice and lend to their words the appertunance of charm. The conference confiscates the writer's energies from him, forces him to submit to an alien rule of sociability. So then, on the train returning home from the conference, looking out of the windows at the old docklands, the tall steel and glass buildings reflecting the winter sun, then he begins to write. Becuase this returning home after conference exhaustion, this is itself a figure of writing.

"One day noticing a small swelling on his stomach, he felt genuinely happy at the thought that he had, perhaps, a tumour which would prove fatal, that he need no longer concern himself with anything, that illness was going to govern his life, to make a plaything of him, until the non-distant end'

Perhaps not to this extent, but the writer is sometimes caught wishing for illness, as for a bay into which he can sail and disembark. Here, disburdedned of temporal duties he can set up his work station. Here, with his writing tablet, his fountain pen, he can begin the ritual of summoning his hidden self to the table.

S.B Arkem-Low