I don’t have an addictive personality. Tried but never got addicted to cigarettes, alcohol, or drugs. Addiction is defined as not having control over doing, taking, or using something to the point where it could be harmful to you. I read the passage below by John Updike and it made me think that I do have other “addictions,” though I don’t find my addiction to reading and writing to be harmful. Then again, I have a few friends who think I spend too much time doing both and it is harming my social life.
“Writing … is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody. In the morning light one can write breezily, without the slight acceleration of one’s pulse, about what one cannot contemplate in the dark without turning in panic to God. In the dark one truly feels that immense sliding, that turning of the vast earth into darkness and eternal cold, taking with it all the furniture and scenery, and the bright distractions and warm touches, of our lives. Even the barest earthly facts are unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying, distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.
- John Updike
I found the Updike quote on John Winokur‘s website advicetowriters.com. I was checking it out because I had been reading his book, The Portable Curmudgeon, in preparation for 2024.
Milneville 