Inside the words

There was a time when ‘Writer’ meant more than a person who was gifted with words. It meant a lifestyle. Now, if someone says they’re a Writer they join the gazillion others who have written books, and the fairytale has lost it’s meaning. We have become a group of boilerplate editions. Cut out of pieces with different faces, different places and story lines that seem to run parallel with the last book written by the same author.

Earnest Hemmingway (The Old Man and The Sea), F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Jack London (Call of the Wild), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway), Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit), Isak Denison (Out of Africa), Henry Thoreau (Walden)…… These are just some of the writers who lived the way they wrote: in utter defiance of the mainstream. Their words depict a way of elitist life that does not exist today. And they lived that life. They were the chosen few who went deep below the surface. They were Artists, who with pen, who with brush, yet all lived within a circle of the gift. They spoke their own language.

The writers of yesterday were eccentrics who hungered for the lifestyle within their chosen sphere, found the niche, and lived in it. They did not relate to the outsiders, they lived within the words, within the drawings. Their words and their drawings were who they were. There was no distinction.

I fall within. I experience. I am absorbed. I feel. I am not just a reader, I am the person within the pages written by the authors who lived the words.
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