Writer, Commitment and Concern


The writer’s life is a difficult one, inducing a kind of schizophrenia where one must lead a double life,a secret life of intense and unrestricted dream and fantasy; and a life made public by the very ideas that he has been brave enough to disclose. Who in his right mind would want to lead such a kind of life. Writing itself creates its own dilemma.
I want to reproduce a portion of the lecture, that Mr Orhan Pamukh delivered after accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. It touches the finer points on writer and writing with a realistic view.
“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: To write is to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination – that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.”

What is it in the writer that makes him a carrier of the country’s conscience? The writer perceives a reality more deeply embedded in human society. He is aware of man’s struggle – a struggle that goes on unremittingly. He knows and understands the deterioration, the cry of anguish, the hopes, and the higher expectations of a people before the society.
The writer’s commitment is a daunting one. He must as a spokesman for the rest of his people, articulating their spiritual longings and dreams. And he must continue to guard in himself that sense of faithfulness and loyalty to the truth and to his art. He must expose the real enemies of this universal moral order? The foremost one at stake is his freedom as a writer. Writers are still chased everywhere, especially the young writers who have much to give to society, and so much to say about the mess that our world has made of itself.

Raghs49

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