It is difficult to describe the degree and nature of tension which aggravates the fault line between being a religious man and writer of fiction. Call it a type of existential strife, a goading and constant friction, a frustrating and at times debilitating clash, which leaves neither of these sides of me alone or unharmed. And as we are trained to lead with our heads—this whole western Judeo-Christian model—let’s suppose that this conflict begins ontologically: whilst the purview and focus of any orthodox man will be to perceive, learn, then be informed by the revealed and the hidden Torah as well as Judaism’s weltanschauung on spiritual, intellectual, and emotional matters of weight—in short, to be involved and utterly engaged with reality-as-is—the purpose of any writer of fiction, somewhat contrarily, is nothing short of the attempt to remake reality convincingly in one’s own image. I say, ‘somewhat’, because great books do get at great truths; and I say, ‘contrarily,’ because Judaism’s version of truth apprehension couldn’t be more distant than that of a novelist’s.
For that remaking is nothing if not a sign of the writer’s unhappiness with the unadorned world, the visceral need for escape. And though a novelist uses the palette of the world for his conceptions—the way things really do feel, taste, smell, sound, and provoke thought—the writer’s love of the quotidian is at best sketchy and, frankly, more akin to the kabbalistic concept of the yearning of the soul to free itself from its bodily shell. And so while writing—nay, all art—is also the desire to conjure, arrange, systematize, concretize, beautify, magnify, highlight, criticize, good writing will paste onto one’s cognition a subtext and ubertext for a way to sense the world. Which is precisely why books change lives. And which leads us toward the most uncomfortable conclusion of all: that it is perhaps this very fault line of tension between warring parts of the psychic whole which produces both a competent sense of reality as well as the means of its stylization which produces the stuff of good writing. The trick, of course, to being a wizard—for isn’t that the goal of all the conjuring?—is to ply your black magic while remaining a healthy citizen, to somehow live with and not at odds with your angst and resist the all-too-present allure of alcohol, women, drugs, debilitating distraction and procrastination.
Insanity is a third type of solution.
The fourth option is, as Flaubert wrote, ‘Faire et se taire,’ which means, roughly, Shut up and get on with it.
