Reading reviews of your first novel makes you feel a lot of different things. And by “you” here I mean “me.” I don’t know why I always write “you.” Maybe I want the company.
Sometimes reviews make you feel like this:
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
Except usually you do let it.
More often you feel like this:
To live, to lie awake
under scarred plaster
while ice is forming over the earth
at an hour when nothing can be done to further any decision
And sometimes even like this:
He chose a halter from among the rest,
And with it hung himself, unbid, unblest.
If instead you’re feeling blessed, and by this I do mean you as well as me, and it has nothing to do with writing, you get a moment of this:
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Adrienne Rich, “Incipience,” Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being.”
