Language, reading, time.

"Of course it is the writer's daily self that lives the life and has the original experiences. But it some other agency in him, what I've called the writing-self, that records them, and working in its own way, according to its own needs and in its own language, colours them feeling, gives them resonance and meaning, so that when they come up in the writing -- as the writing calls them up -- they may be as new and surprising to the writer as they will be to the eventual reader. They have been reshaped, given a different emphasis, Transformed.

The truth is that it is the writing that shapes and leads the writer, not the other way round. The writing self grows out of the writing and grows with it -- that is what we ought to mean by a writer's 'development' -- and a good deal of all this has to do with the creative action of language itself, though by language I mean something very different from the words a writer may have at his disposal for talk.

The gap between the language of writing and the language of talk: In talk, language is at the service of what needs to be said. In writing, language is an active agent in what gets said. That is why writers are so wary of talk. They know that if you allow what wants to get written, what needs to get written, to be expressed in the serviceable language of talk, the writing will not happen. Talk will have already moved in and done the job, blocked out forever what the writing, in its own more hesitant way, was about to reveal."

-- David Malouf

*

"Entering a story -- a fairytale or folk-tale or fable: being taken out of ourselves into the skin of another; having adventures there that are both our own and not our own -- is an experience of a aprticular kind. Release from the constrictions, whatever they may be, of our own life and body into a dimension where reality is not limited to dailiness and the laws of nature, and all sorts of occassions, richer and more fantastic, more exciting, more harrowing, can be imagined forth -- imagined -- and made real. There is a regenerative and healing quality here that makes such experiences something more than entertainment or simply a way of passing the time; though the passing of time is also essential to it.

Time in a story passes more quickly than in real life -- 'the next day' we say, all in a breath, or 'some yeas later'. But it may also pass more slowly, or stop altogether, giving the narrator, and the listener, the luxury of looking around and absorbing things that in real life are gone too quickly to be taken in, or to consider and ask questions that real life leaves no space for. Such games offer a momentary respite from calendar and body time into the free time of 'ever after'. As if by losing ourselves in the story, we had, at least for its duration, stopped the body's clock from ticking on inevitably to death, and escaped its laws and limitations."

-- David Malouf 

*

Say, how time is held in this painting. Allows us to dilate time to stare, at time in passing in the stages of life, at transient time which perhaps last only for a moment in the twilight sky, here, all together. 

The Stages of Life by Caspar David Friedrich

*

Perhaps, when spirit put itself in a form to perhaps explore, play, understand, go around a 'let's say' scenario, perhaps then, as it took form, time was created. It finds itself swimming in time, tries to get its bearing. And then, as it plays with time, perhaps its thoughts turn to how to adorn time. Its companion, its playmate.