8 This is the part about seeing and wanting to be liked.

There are many ways of looking at a thing or person and devising a story in relation to it, but “looking” implies seeing: it implicates the eyes.

Quantum mechanics posits objects that only begin to exist when observed. In the era of the image, “going viral” makes Hollywood fame seem accessible to everyone. We don’t ask ourselves if we desire fame so much as consume its desirability, and then find ourselves wanting the thing we hate.

We want to be seen, to be recognized as something, and this “something” is the part we rarely consider because being “seen” is good in itself. To be popular is to be desired by many, to have something that others want. This is one of the games humans play with mirrors, and writers are not exempt from this game.

Reflecting back on her life as a writer, Marguerite Duras noticed that her mistakes only increased her appetite for writing. “I had completely screwed up my life,” she wrote. “And so I had fertile, abundant ground to write on. When I say suffering, here, I mean, the ambiguous ground of happiness.”

The ambiguous ground of happiness. What an angle into the alienated intellectual vacuity of acquisitive suburban life. As Duras sees it, pain is part of life; it is bound up in this activity known as living, and implicated in the gift of being alive, which is simply the luck of being able to continue to write. Publication, or what Duras fondly dubs “the prostitution of publication,” involves the communal act of sharing these words. Publication is part of writing, or part of what it means to write. It occurs in relation to a public.^[1]

The anxiety and uncertainty are normal responses to what the book demands. To write is to coexist with terror long enough to shape it, spark it, handle it intimately.

To write is to kiss the monster.

Or, to quote Duras: “If the fear didn’t exist, you wouldn’t write.”