A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [155]
"A family isn't a relay race, with a profession as the torch," [Hannah] said.*
For many years my father did not abandon the hope that eventually the mantle of Uncle Joseph would alight on him, and that he might pass it on to me when the time came, if I followed the family tradition and became a scholar. And if, because of his dreary job that left him only the night hours for his research, the mantle passed over him, perhaps his only son would inherit it.
I have the feeling that my mother wanted me to grow up to express the things that she had been unable to express.
In later years they repeatedly reminded me, with a chuckle combined with pride they reminded me, in the presence of all their guests they reminded me, in front of the Zarchis and the Rudnickis and the Hananis and the Bar Yitzhars and the Abramskis they always reminded me how, when I was only five years old, a couple of weeks after I learned the letters of the alphabet, I printed in capital letters on the back of one of Father's cards the legend amos klausner writer, and pinned it up on the door of my little room.
*My Michael, trans. Nicholas de Lange (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 6.
I knew how books were made even before I knew how to read. I would sneak in and stand on tiptoe behind my father's back as he bent over his desk, his weary head floating in the pool of yellow light from his desk lamp, as he slowly, laboriously made his way up the winding valley between the two piles of books on the desk, picking all sorts of details from the tomes that lay open in front of him, plucking them out, holding them up to the light, examining them, sorting them, copying them onto little cards, and then fitted each one in its proper place in the puzzle, like stringing a necklace.
In fact, I work rather like him myself. I work like a watchmaker or an old-fashioned silversmith: one eye screwed up, the other fitted with a watchmaker's magnifying glass, with fine tweezers between my fingers, with bits of paper rather than cards in front of me on my desk on which I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one of these particles, these molecules of text, carefully with my tweezers, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and I take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove it, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own?
I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments, or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again.
Writing a novel, I said once, is like trying to make the Mountains of Edom out of Lego blocks. Or to build the whole of Paris, buildings, squares, and boulevards, down to the last street bench, out of matchsticks.
If you write an eighty-thousand-word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions, not just decisions about the outline of the plot, who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself, the names and faces of the characters, their habits and occupations, the