But at least the butterflies were back filling my garden today, and the House Martins were back to their old numbers filling the summer
sky, and the house plants that have been ailing for a couple of years are back
to growing strongly again. Meanwhile, that wonderfully inspirational section
called Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations is blasting out of my
headset.
Does this mean something? I never jump to conclusions.
2 comments:
When I was in middle school I wrote a story about a girl who has a brain tumor and after it's removed, finds she has lost the ability to write. I had no idea how plausible this was medically and figured I had just made it up. I also had no concept of writers' block because I had always been able to write insatiably.
I probably read The Golden Compass around the same time, and was horrified by the part (spoiler alert) where Lyra realizes she's grown up and no longer knows how to interpret the alethiometer.
Since then I've had my own fall from grace and found that writing is fickle and comes and goes unexpectedly. I'm not sure what this adds to what you've said aside from the fact that I sympathize.
I said in a previous post that writer’s block seems to come in two forms – the sort where you can’t think of anything to write, and the sort where you can but you can’t make the right words fall in the right order. The first doesn’t bother me too much because I know something will come along sooner or later. The second I find dispiriting. It feels as though some essential faculty of mind has atrophied and I’ve lost the one thing I occasionally do well. And when you lose something, you can’t be certain you’ll ever find it.
I suppose His Dark Materials would have had special appeal to you because of your Oxford connection. I got very fond of it too, and for a long time Lyra was my favourite female literary character (along with the chief witch whose name I don’t remember.) What I disliked was the fact that at the end the more mature Lyra was going to be a good girl after all and toe the cultural line. I suspect she was the seminal spark which led to my growing conviction that if the planet is to have a satisfactory future, today’s young women are the ones we need to rely on.
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