I have been struggling with what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp” in The Ecstasy of Influence:
“For me, there’s a weird, unfathomable gulf—I almost wrote gulp—between the completion of a novel and its publication. Some days this duration feels interminable, as though the book has voyaged out like some spacecraft on a research mission, populated by forgotten losers like the ones in John Carpenter’s Dark Star, a craft cut loose by those who launched the thing and now grown irretrievable, bent by space and time into something distorted and not worth guiding home. Then there are other days, where the book might be a pitch that’s left your hand too soon, now burning toward home plate, whether to be met by a catcher’s mitt or the sweet part of the bat you can’t possibly know. Hopeless to regret it once you feel it slipping past your fingertips. Just watch. (That’s the gulp.) The weirdness is in that interlude where the book has quit belonging to you but doesn’t belong to anyone else yet, hasn’t been inscribed in all its rightness and wrongness by the scattershot embrace and disdain of the world. It’s a version of Schrödinger’s cat, unchangeably neither dead nor alive in its box.”
I’ve been relying heavily on my old method of Living For Dinnertime.
I’ve also been keeping Bertrand Russell in mind:
“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
And trying to keep a bit of cosmicomic perspective on things:
In Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, Jerry Seinfeld explains why he pinned photos from the Hubble Space Telescope up on the wall in the Seinfeld writing room.
“It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important,” Seinfeld said. “You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it.”
When Apatow said that sounded depressing, Seinfeld replied, “People always say it makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t find being insignificant depressing. I find it uplifting.”
The kids in the forthcoming book are little kids — like, ages 3-7 — but those kids are now teen and tween. Still, they keep serving me up one-liners and inspiration, like my 11-year-old’s take on crazy sock day.
Profound wisdom there. (“Out of the mouths of babes” would’ve been a good secret sentence for this book…)