A Walker in the Suburbs

“My favorite poem is the one I’ve just written,” said the Latin American poet Ernesto Cardenale. I listened to Cardenale on the radio yesterday as I walked through a steadily darkening dusk.

This made me wonder: Is my favorite blog post the one I’ve just written. It’s not, of course. I can’t call them all to mind anymore now, because there have been hundreds, though some stand out. One or two I’ve written in New York, some of my European ones from May 2010, book reviews, and odd, random ones, like the paragraphs I wrote August 18, 2010, the day we donated our old car, or one earlier that month, August 2, about sunsets awing us into silence.

The fact is, some days posts come easily and some days they don’t. The point is not the ease. The point is the doing.

The significance of the title is not the meaning of the word email. It’s the lack of hyphen. Until recently, according to the editor’s bible — or one of them, the AP Stylebook — email was e-mail. Then e-mail went the way of Web site, and things haven’t been the same since.

The magazine I edit bases its style on AP’s, and so I dutifully changed Web site to website when that alteration was announced last year. But I missed the memo on email. This morning’s newspaper tells me why. The Washington Post has kept the hyphen, so I remained oblivious to the change.

Why do these things matter so much? The fine article in today’s Post explains that, too, quoting David Minthorn, deputy standards editor of the Associated Press. “We’re not a bunch of old fogies sitting around in our ivory tower. We’re alive to changes and new ideas. We have a real sense that new words and changes in language reflect the culture and give us an inkling to where society is headed.”

Think of editors as warriors, standing guard over a culture where standards don’t matter, insisting — with their sharpened pencils — that they do.

Before the blog is written, before the essay, too, the floor must be swept, dishes stowed, smudges wiped. The grime that’s hidden, that can stay, but surface dirt is doomed.

Still, surface dirt takes time.

So words are choked, ideas evaporate — sometimes. Other times they come back, richer than before. On days I work at home I laugh at myself. To clear my mind I run around with vacuum and rag. It is the price I pay to write without guilt.

At the writing contest awards ceremony Friday night, and again this morning as I finished reading Out Stealing Horses, a lovely novel by the Norwegian author Per Petterson, I think about fiction and nonfiction, how close they can lie, how they are the same bones with different skin.

In this novel an old man recalls a summer that altered his life, that took his 15-year-old self and changed it forever. So fully does he live in his own thoughts, this man, that at one point he wonders if “the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversation we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one from the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line…”

There is one conversation in our heads, one story. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether it emerges as fiction or memoir, essay or poem. All that matters is letting it out.

Re-reading yesterday’s post (yes, I do this sometimes!), I realized it might sound as if the only error in the magazine is the one I intentionally left in. I wish that were true! The problem is, I know there are errors, but I can’t always find them. Proofreading is an art, not a science. It has clear rules and expectations, but also a bit of the mysterious. How else to explain my ability to look right at a mistake and not see it — until it’s in print.

What I was trying to get at yesterday (and which deserves longer treatment later) is the process of letting go that accompanies creative work. At some point you must come to terms with the fact that the essay/painting/song/magazine will not be perfect. Otherwise you will never finish. Humility can be of some help in this endeavor.

For the last week I’ve been in “crunch mode,” editing and proofing the magazine, reading pages over and over and over again looking for misplaced commas, extra spaces and other minutiae. There comes a point with every issue when I must let something go, when the cost to fix the error is too high or too risky, because it could result in a mistake more grievous than the one it hopes to repair.

It is at this point that I think about the humility block. This is the practice of making an intentional error in a quilt — turning a block the wrong way, for instance — to avoid perfection. Only God is perfect, the theory goes, so it’s presumptuous to create something that rivals the divine. Rug weavers do the same thing, slip in a odd thread or two to mar their creations and avoid the “evil eye.”

Sounds good, but from what I’ve been able to learn, it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, a myth; the mistakes in antique quilts are just that — mistakes. But I like knowing that deep in the class notes section of the magazine is a boldface comma that should be Roman. It’s my humility block.

Photo: Courtesy of Etsy.com.

Astute readers of these posts will notice that they’re as often about books and writing as they are about walking. No walking today; I’m not feeling well enough to get out of bed. So into the bed come books, journal, newspaper, laptop and notes for the article I have to write whether I’m sick or not.

Writing in bed makes me remember something I’d heard about Winston Churchill, that he spent most of his mornings in bed, reading all the daily newspapers, dictating to his secretary, writing. I also learned from a book called The Writer’s Desk that Edith Wharton, Colette, Proust, James Joyce and Walker Percy all wrote in bed. I have to laugh about Walker Percy. For a while it seemed that every novel my book group chose had been blurbed by Walker Percy. Perhaps Percy did his blurbing in bed, too.

I just finished reading Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, Must You Go? I marvel at the honesty and the tenderness of Antonia’s portrayal of her husband — and also at how they seemed to know everyone in the literary and political establishments. It reminds me of something I know but seldom think about: how small the world is at the top.

But my favorite line has nothing to do with literary lions or radical politics. It is instead this almost off-the-cuff observation Antonia made April 4, 1979: “My idea of happiness is to be alone in a room in a house full of people.”

I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but I understand and agree. We must be alone in order to create; we must be with loved ones in order to live.