Parte do ensaio de Norman Mailer - Birds and Lions - sobre escritores e a escrita

Just as we pay for the social insularity of Detroit engineers by having to look at the repetitive hump of their designs until finally what is most amazing about the automobile is how little it has been improved in the past fifty years, so literature suffers from its own endemic hollow: we are overfamiliar with the sensitivity of the sensitive and relatively ignorant of the cunning of the strong and the stupid. We remain one-it may be fatal-step removed from an intimate perception of the procedures of the corporate, financial, governmental, Mafia, and working-class establishments. Investigative journalism has taken us into the guts of the machine, but not far enough-we still do not have much idea of the soul of any inside operator... Of course, many a young writer has put himself in danger in order to pick up material for his writing, but, as a matter to make one wistful, not one major American athlete, politician, engineer, trade-union official, surgeon, airline pilot, chess master, call girl, sea captain, bureaucrat, mafioso, pimp, recidivist, physicist, rabbi, movie star, clergyman, priest, or nun has emerged as a major novelist since the Second World War. Novelists are oxymorons. They are sensitive and insensitive. Full of heart and heartless. You have to be full of heart to feel what other people are feeling. On the other hand, if you start thinking of all the damage you are going to do, you can’t write the book-not if you’re reasonably decent. (Of course, a malicious person might kick off the traces, and feel young and happy again at being so mean.) The point is that you are facing a true problem. Either you produce a book that doesn’t approach what really interests you or, if you go to the root with all you’ve got, there is no way you won’t injure family, friends, and innocent bystanders... There is a touch of writer’s block in almost every working day. It is part of the experience of writing. When you are faced with this situation, there is a tendency to force a continuation, but that can be equal to blowback. From its point of view, the unconscious has done its job. It’s damned if it’s going to give you any more right now. If you insist, flatness of affect will be your reward-nothingness, the dread antagonist. One of the most painful elements in the act of writing is to live so much of the day with that nothingness. It is why many talented men and women produce a good book or two, then stop. To deal on a daily basis with nothingness is vitiating. Writers who have been at it for decades often do not keep a vital inner life. ...Suppose the unconscious has a root in the hereafter which our conscious mind does not. If so, it will have deeper notions about death than we do. Let us then dare to surmise that the unconscious is on close, even familial, terms with that most elusive presence in the conscious mind-our soul. If that is the case, the unconscious will feel exploited by the novelist’s push to extract so much of its resources...