WORDS AND LETTERS

Saturday, 18 December 2010

Pain CLARISSA TAN Do not be afraid of your pain. Do not be afraid, for it appears more hurtful than it actually is. Do not be afraid to enter your pain and have a good look round, as though paying a long-delayed visit to a kindly old aunt.	Forgiveness CLARISSA TAN Writing is forgiving yourself.
Ping CLARISSA TAN I wonder how I’m going to write a whole novel, if I get distracted even during a few paragraphs. Wait. Hold on. I think someone’s just texted me.	Butterfly CLARISSA TAN While walking home the other day, I had so many ideas for this post. They swarmed like butterflies around my head. Alert, confident, I felt I would be able to remember them all, make them reappear as soon as I need them, which is now. But nothing - not a single butterfly - comes, and I stare glumly at the cursor.
Shakespeare CLARISSA TAN I wonder if he knew. I wonder if he knew how big he would become. I wonder if, when puttering about the Globe, he understood that one day he would be played and spoken around the world, in umpteen languages with strange and foreign interpretations. I wonder if he knew he would be used, abused, treasured, quoted and misquoted across the ages.	Denial CLARISSA TAN I have, many times in my life, wished I weren’t a book-lover. I would have given anything to be the sort of person whose greatest joy lies in the latest music and fashions, rather than in the nerdy rustling of semi-forgotten books.
Confession CLARISSA TAN I try to keep my contract with you. I try, as far as possible, to write as soon as the words come, to write often, and to let my sentences sit here steadily, exactly the way they were when I first let them out.	Protection CLARISSA TAN You are afraid to be alone. This is why, when left on your own, you turn words into companions, making them your friends, twisting them this way and that, building thoughts and arguments and hypotheses and explanations to surround yourself.
Gardening CLARISSA TAN Words need space to grow. It is estimated that a healthy, bouncing baby word requires at least three acres of prime land in which to develop and reach its full potential.	Nameless CLARISSA TAN Imagine a world without words. You open the door - only it is not a door, it is something else, it has no name. You hear your own footfalls on the stairs, only they are not footfalls and these are not stairs. There is no room.
Voice CLARISSA TAN I used to think that my greatest fear was to write, and have no one read. To disseminate words, and have them falling like so many dead leaves on a cracked pavement. To roll out pages, and be greeted by robust rounds of silence.	Ripple CLARISSA TAN If you remain very silent, if you are still, you will feel a ripple. It is a small ripple, the faintest hint of a murmur of a flutter of a lightwave, but it is there. It is the silent tug at our hearts, the undercurrent of our lives, the silver threads of being that gently wind and unwind as we move and dance and play.