Freedom to Write, Freedom to Think

 And so, too, think on these points from Richard Flanagan's Against the Literature of Silence: Richard Flanagan on the Writer’s Freedom to Embrace Heresy:

It may be as a species we are defined by our ability to forget, yet freedom exists only in the space of memory.

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To write I had to be free and to be free I had to write.

That, for a writer, is the task, the only task.

To be free.

***

Of the many pernicious fictions writers retail to themselves and, given the chance, to others, perhaps the most ludicrous is that writers wish to write the truth.

Of course nothing is further from the truth than this lie.

Encrusting the lie are comforting nonsenses. One of which writers are fond is that the truth carries all before it. But truth mostly serves only to carry the truth teller to the abyss personally—and quickly.

Much as they may pretend otherwise writers, as a rule, are not such fools as to not know this.

***

We all lie about our reasons in order that we might live, and, when the going gets rough, writers and artists generally roll over quicker than most. William Hazlitt once observed that for every tyrant born so too are a thousand men willing to be enslaved. We might add, that of that thousand, a disproportionate number will always be the artists and writers.

*** 

We all write in the nightmare of the dark. We cannot escape our tribal impulse, our desire to conform—for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and goodness, perhaps even deeper. But a novel, when it succeeds, takes the writer beyond their own history and character, escapes the shackles of their politics and opinions, and in the alchemy of story makes of the writer’s soul that which joins one human being with all.

Be a heretic suggests Flanagan. I could say my joining the  Orthodox Church was a heretical act for an American.