I was on vacation. My muse was not.
Is a love affair with a book akin to cheating? Does a writer ever really take time off?
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Each week I share thoughts on my quest to retell Sarah’s story in poetry, plus I share a poem from the collection-in-progress.
Except that is, when I am on vacation, as I was last week. While I get caught up on laundry and emails, I hope you’ll take this opportunity to catch up on some poems from The Life of H: Sarah, Reimagined.
“A false worker, the writer is also a false vacationer. One of them writes his memoir, another corrects his proofs, a third is preparing his next book. … The writer is on vacation, but his muse is wide awake, and gives birth nonstop." - Roland Barthes, “The Writer on Vacation”
Communing with a book — and my husband
My husband, seated beside me on the ferry, is the picture of contentment. In his baseball cap and shorts, with a cup of Dunkin dark roast in his hand, and a book of humorous essays by David Sedaris in his lap. He turns to me to share an observation. I’m not sure what it is about, because I’m immersed in another story.
I glance up from the book in my hands, whose moss-green and gray cover poetically echoes the hues of the wind-frothed sea our ferry is furrowing through, and I offer a vague response.
I know I should be trying to follow what my husband is saying. Instead, I thumb the edges of the pages of my book. This infidelity of attention feels like a small marital transgression.
Or maybe I just don’t know how to take time off the way other people do. As a writer, vacation for me means communing with a book as well as with my husband.
In that sense, as a writer, I’m always cheating; I serially devote myself to one or the other of my passions.
As soon as I opened A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa, the book I had slipped into my tote bag for this trip, I fell into a literary swoon. In this memoir, a contemporary woman poet imagines the life of another woman poet who lived hundreds of years ago. The book was recommended to me by a writer in my manuscript group who suggested it would inspire me as I work on my poetry about the biblical matriarch, Sarah.
She was right. Nearly every one of Ghríofa’s finely stitched sentences is something I wish I’d written. I copy my favorites into my notebook just to touch them again. I observe how she unknots literary problems of shifting between two starkly different centuries and keeps both timelines moving forward, as I must do in my own work.
Throughout the trip, I read and annotate lying belly down and propped on elbows on a beach blanket, or seated beside my husband in matching Adirondack chairs overlooking the ocean, or at night before bed in our hotel room. While my husband scrolls The New York Times, I sink into a conversation on the page with my literary companion.
For most, the guilty pleasure is indulging in beach books that go down like mouthfuls of pastel-sweet mind candy. My guilty pleasure: Sneaking in some work, even though the away message on my email says I’m on vacation.
I walk on the beach with my husband. We swim. We laugh. We discover new restaurants and return to old favorites. My book waits on the bedstand in our hotel room. Or it is tucked into the backpack with our towels and sunscreen as we bike to the beach.
On our last morning by the sea, my husband and I are seated on the patio of our favorite breakfast place, where I have a quinoa bowl with dried apricots and he has a bagel and smoked salmon. We each have our book, discreetly closed for the moment, at our elbow. Until, when the dishes have been cleared and our second coffees have been poured, we pick them up.
Every few minutes, I reach for my pen and scribble in my notebook. And every few minutes my husband raises an eyebrow at one of Sedaris’s sardonic lines, and breaks into a laugh.
For I don’t know how long, we contentedly sip, and turn our pages.
I wish we could linger here forever.
Speaking of catching up … this week’s post was based on last year’s vacation. This year’s beach trip I brought along a different book: Those who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. I think I may finally be getting the hang of the whole beach read thing, after all!
For more on my evolving relationship with books and travel, read this post, too:
Learn about me, my books, 1:1 dreamwork and writing sessions at www.thirdhousemoon.com.
Tzivia, I resonated greatly with your post about reading as a “love affair”, whether on the beach or in bed just before sleep. Sometimes during the day, especially if I feel frustrated by not having made time to read, I remind myself that bedtime and a night table full of books awaits me.