The Nice Thing About Strangers
Creative Non-Fiction Short Stories. :) Travel, Oldsters, Love, and Compassion.
Writing on the Beach
Writing is the only activity which makes me feel “only I could produce this.” Whether or not “this” is any use is of course the crucial question to which I know not & may not ever know, the answer. Meanwhile I am writing fairly regularly, both poetry and prose.
-Iris Murdoch. The Writer at War.
Back in Croatia.
The Nice Thing About Strangers 
I happened to be reading Pessoa today who had thoughts on this which are not nearly as optimistic, and unfortunately, I identify with Pessoa…
“Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten. The things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they’ve been achieved) the worst aspect of real things: the fact they’re perishable. But that’s not what worries or grieves me about these pages as I reread them now, in these idle moments. What grieves me is that it wasn’t worth my trouble to write them, and the time I spent doing it earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth doing…
What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I dream of, if he existed, would have done it better. Everything we do, in art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of the standard it should meet but also of the standard we thought it could meet. We’re hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in our expectations and in our realizations.”
I read Pessoa optimistically, even when he’s being glum. I guess because he feels his work won’t last, but he quite literally changed my life. So you never know who you’ll be a “Pessoa” for one day! 🙂
Beautiful blue sea! I always feel so inspired when I go to the ocean.
I do as well. The water in Croatia is the color of something fictional! It’s like a movie blue! I love it for a time as a chance to reflect.