The girl regularly whispered, loudly, throughout the first Act. I shushed her. Her mother or grandmother indulged or ignored her (where's the Tiger mom instinct when we need it?). We were in the second f*ing row. If your six-, seven-, eight-year old child can't shut the f* up for forty minutes at a time (between intermissions), don't bring her to the ballet. I know you parents just love it when I lecture you about how to raise your kids, but you can suck it. Raise your kids however the f* you want, but don't unleash them on society until they learn to shut the f* up for forty minutes.
Anyway, I didn't smack her. I've been reading up on civil disobedience. But just before the start of the second Act, I asked the grandmother/mother to ask her not to talk, because it was very distracting. And it worked. Instead of tilting her head to listen, she shushed her. And the girl talked less. Which was wonderful, because the dance of the Naiads was possibly the most beautiful dance performance I've seen in my life. It was amazing.
The girl was promptly shushed the few times she opened her mouth during the third Act, which I could take or leave. It was the least unique of the three. But it was still better without comments from the peanut gallery.
***
I am not reading Sarah Palin's e-mails because I do not care. I cannot convey, in words, the extent to which I Do Not Care.
I'm also kind of done with Weinergate, but sometimes I come across something I can't resist posting.
***
There was so much in Jhumpa Lahiri's essay that spoke to me. I'm going to excerpt a few especially striking paragraphs, but I highly recommend the whole thing.
As I grew into adolescence and beyond, however, my writing shrank in what seemed to be an inverse proportion to my years. Though the compulsion to invent stories remained, self-doubt began to undermine it, so that I spent the second half of my childhood being gradually stripped of the one comfort I’d known, that formerly instinctive activity turning thorny to the touch. I convinced myself that creative writers were other people, not me, so that what I loved at seven became, by seventeen, the form of self-expression that most intimidated me...At twenty-one, the writer in me was like a fly in the room—alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone. I was not at a stage where I needed to worry about rejection from others. My insecurity was systemic, and preëmptive, insuring that, before anyone else had the opportunity, I had already rejected myself...
I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, “Listen to me.”
This was where I faltered. I preferred to listen rather than speak, to see instead of be seen. I was afraid of listening to myself, and of looking at my life...
As a child, I did not know the exact meaning of “tenure,” but when my father obtained it I sensed what it meant to him. I set out to do as he had done, and to pursue a career that would provide me with a similar stability and security. But at the last minute I stepped away, because I wanted to be a writer instead. Stepping away was what was essential, and what was also fraught. Even after I received the Pulitzer Prize, my father reminded me that writing stories was not something to count on, and that I must always be prepared to earn my living in some other way. I listen to him, and at the same time I have learned not to listen, to wander to the edge of the precipice and to leap. And so, though a writer’s job is to look and listen, in order to become a writer I had to be deaf and blind.
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