The Amoral Writer

Those who have made the leap into what a writer truly is – an amoral scribe of his times – are not devoid of a conventional humanity. All that of course has to be extinguished insofar as possible. There's a price, as the realization grows of what he should be doing and writing. The best and the strongest – like Cendrars – leave the world to wonder and gaze at the sidereal tracks they have left behind. As for his basic humanity – his eldest son, Odile, showed up at his door after a seventeen year absence. It was during the war, and if the father was penniless, the son lacked even a roof over his head. “I cannot help you, you are not staying with me,” was the response of the son, and no amount of begging could change his mind. In a later letter, he defended his refusal to pay any money for the support of his children. “They will see one day that I am their best friend”. There is no-one we can count on, and there is no one who can rely on us. Everything changes, mutates, extinguishes, regenerates. The rest, all of it, is the eternal stupidity, the cretinism that binds us together, the brick and mortar of our dense mortal minds, as we huddle together in the slaughterhouse, hoping desperately for a last minute reprieve.