Uitgelezen 107

‘The crisis. Not a hugely original one – part developmental, part existential, largely silly. I didn’t even take it very seriously when I was in it. Its genealogy can be traced back at least as far as the start of the fourteenth century and Dante’s Divine Comedy: ‘In the middle of our life’s path / I found myself in a dark forest’. In the footsteps of a million men and women before me, I was trundling along, deep into my forties, when, like Dante – though lacking the emollient of either Christian faith or personal genius – I found myself plunged into that dark forest. (…)
I had read somewhere about a distinction between sitting writers and walking writers and it was so obvious which was supposed to be better that I decided to become one. Even though I wasn’t writing anything, just walking. Pretending that I was a walking writer went some way to quelling my panic. I felt good about feeling bad as I trudged along, as if I were inhabiting the part more fully.
It was a short step from this pretence, barely a step at all, to telling my wife and then my friends and the distant acquaintances at parties and then even complete strangers that I was engaged in research for a book, a work of non-fiction, about the very trees I was hiding in, or at least about the other people who had hidden in them first. Having begun this fiction, though, I was forced to inhabit it, so that the difference between faking writing a book about the forest and actually writing a book about the forest became, almost instantly, very small. (…)
Gradually I convinced myself that, contrary to what I knew, this was a serious undertaking. I convinced myself, moreover, that this undertaking could, in and of itself, somehow save me.’
[Will Ashon, Strange Labyrint, p. 9-12.]