What If Our World is Their Heaven by Gwen Lee

Author:Gwen Lee [LEE, GWEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO007000
ISBN: 9781468302288
Publisher: Overlook
Published: 2012-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

LEE: Let’s hear more about you. OK. Your experiences of writing. We’ve heard about this new one—have you got a tentative title for it?

DICK: It’s got a title all right—it’s called The Owl in Daylight, you see.

LEE: The Owl in Daylight.

DICK: Yeah, it’s a folk expression from the South where the guys meet and he says that’s the—it means he’s—his judgment is clouded. An owl being blind in daylight. Owls cannot see in daylight. They become confused and they fly into things and get killed—it simply means a person whose judgment is clouded over. And I heard it on a TV program just as a line spoken by a character and it made a tremendous impression on me. “The owl in daylight.” And I wanted to write about a guy who pushes his brain to its limit. He’s aware that he has reached his limit but voluntarily decides to go on and pay the consequences. And then I realized that this is simply a restatement of the whole Faustian thing—is that this, in point of fact, is what the whole Faustian thing is about, that the consequences are ignored in the pursuit of what for a creative person is some kind of artistic vision. But it could be the same with money. I mean it could be, you know, the acquisition of property, it could be, could be.

I mean, it’s really the striving where the person becomes aware of whatever it is he’s striving for is the cost. You know, the ratio, like, you know on a graph where the cost rises in proportion to the output, is that the cost line is rising higher and closing the gap all the time, you know. So that you could look on the graph, you can see that those two lines are going to meet and finally the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line—the cost line is going to be higher than the yield line, you know. And this is something I’m beginning to realize about myself that, uh, although I think my writing is getting better all the time, my, my physical stamina is nothing like it used to be. I mean, and also I’m doing so much more research that the wear on me in doing a book is just—well, you hear people say, like, they can no longer drink as much as they used to drink, you know, and it’s—there’s not really that much difference. I mean, uh, for some people it’s very different, for some people it’s drugs, for me it’s writing books, and now—now it’s—I can still write well but the cost—I mean I can just see this graph in my mind, you know, where this cost line is going to finally meet the yield line and the the cost line is going to go above [the] yield line, you see, and it’s inevitable. And then you have—

LEE: Do you feel it’s imminent?

DICK: No. I don’t. I really don’t. I think that that’s one reason I—I haven’t done any writing for some time.

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