Distraction

I'd like to share something with you concerning writing and it's meaning--at least to me.

"If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss.

When you open a novel, and I mean of course the real thing, you enter into a state of intimacy with its writer.  You hear a voice, or more significantly, an individual tone under the words.  This tone, you the reader, will identify not so much by a name, the name of the author, as by a distinct and unique human quality.  It seems to issue from the bosom, from a place beneath the breastbone.  It is more musical than verbal and it is the characteristic signature of a person, of a soul.  Such a writer has power over distraction and fragmentation and out of distressing unrest, even from the edge of chaos, he can bring unity and carry us to a state of intransitive attention.  People hunger for this. 

But this is why the artist competes with other claimants to attention.  He cannot compete in the athletic sense of the word, as if his object was to drive his rivals from the field.  He will never win a clear victory.  Nothing will ever be clear.  The elements are too mixed for that.  The opposing powers are too great to overcome.  They are the powers of an electrified world and of a transformation of human life, the outcome of which cannot be forseen.  Toqueville predicted that in democratic countries, the public would demand larger and larger doses of excitement and increasingly stronger stimulants from its writers.  He probably did not expect that public to dramatize itself so extensively to make the world seem everybody’s theater or in the developed countries to take to alcohol or drugs in order to get relief from the horrors of ceaseless intensity, the torment of thrills and distractions.  A great many writers have done little more than meet the mounting demand for thrills.  I think that this demand has in the language of marketing, peaked.

 Can so much excitement, so much disorder be brought under control?  Such questions must be addressed to analysts and experts in a variety of fields.  Prediction is their business.  The concern of tale tellers and novelists is with the human essences, neglected and forgotten by a distracted world."

~Saul Bellow