Word: paradoxers
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...paradox creeps through literary history like a specter: Edgar Allen Poe and Earnest Hemingway killed themselves. Jack Keroauc drank himself to death. My case is not so extreme, either in talent or depression. But the urge to write, and the emotions that fuel good writing, stem from a deep sensitivity to the world outside. A writer's conscience is like skin so sensitive that the air hurts. You've got to dance with the dark side, my brother always tells...
...care about striking the balance between life and art, I have more immediate anxieties about becoming a writer. I've always been driven by an urgent desire to press my feelings onto paper--to take them away from myself, understand them, and have others understand me. The paradox screamed through my consciousness when I re-read what I wrote about my first year. Sensitive, reflective writing--stuff that's real and human and not manufactured like a last-minute Crimson feature page--doesn't come from taking notes and making phone calls. It comes from within--less inspiration, more desperation...
Hence the never-ending paradox: some bedrock of honesty is fundamental to society; people cannot live together if no one is able to believe what anyone else is saying. But there also seems to be an honesty threshold, a point beyond which a virtue turns mean and nasty. Constantly hearing the truth, the cold, hard, brutal unsparing truth, from spouses, relatives, friends and colleagues is not a pleasant prospect. "Human kind," as T.S. Eliot wrote, "cannot bear very much reality." Truth telling makes it possible for people to coexist; a little lying makes such society tolerable...
...realism. But there are times when realism, a clear-sighted understanding of how things are, shades into fatalism, an assumption that they must stay that way. Eagleburger says he learned from Baker's Middle East diplomacy that persistence in a hopeless task can pay off. But the most interesting paradox about Eagleburger is that a man who is by nature an activist -- a lifelong problem solver who fills up a room with his presence and energy -- also insists that "there are sometimes problems," such as Yugoslavia, "for which there is no immediate solution, and there are sometimes problems for which...
Despite these characteristics, fate and history and my almost chronic sense of inner responsibility have made my life full of paradoxes and absurdities. I was always active in public life as a citizen. This is something I considered an integral part of my mission as a writer. This is something I will have to continue doing. Knowing myself, I won't disappear from public life. It may become another absurdity and paradox of my life that I could be the President of two different states within a short period of time...