Putting the finishing touches on my latest Socialized Recluse episode, a conversation with Liam Wong, and it got me to thinking about this passage from Václav Havel’s December 1976 essay, “Second Wind,” a passage which got me through my own period of silence – and is jumping to the forefront yet again – not only in my conversation with Liam, but in my work:
"Sooner or later, however, a writer (or at least a writer of my type) finds himself at a crossroads: he has exhausted his initial experience of the world and the ways of expressing it and he must decide how to proceed from there. He can, of course, seek ever more brilliant ways of saying the things he has already said; that is, he can essentially repeat himself. Or he can rest in the position he achieved in his first burst of creativity, subordinate everything he learned to the interests of consolidating that position, and thus assure himself a place on Parnassus."But he has a third option: he can abandon everything proven, step beyond his initial experience of the world, with which he is already by now all too familiar, liberate himself from what binds him to his own tradition, to public expectation and to his own established position, and try for a new and more mature self-definition, one that corresponds to his present and authentic experience of the world. In short, he can find his "second wind." Anyone who chooses this route – the only one (if one wishes to go on writing) that genuinely makes sense – will not, as a rule, have an easy time of it. At this stage in his life, a writer is no longer a blank sheet of paper, and some things are hard to part with. His original élan, self-confidence, and spontaneous openness have gone, but genuine maturity is not yet in sight; he must, in fact, start over again, but in essentially more difficult conditions."I found myself at this crossroads in the late 1960s and I'm afraid I'm still looking for my second wind..."
PS: The whole of OPEN LETTERS is essential reading for anyone possessed of humanity.