Pertinent Quote for Me, from Brian Morton, in his novel, “Starting Out in the Evening”
Graduate student, Heather, commenting on seventy-year-old writer, Arthur Schiller, about whom she is writing her thesis:
~~ The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live - Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second. He had dwelled - in those early books, at least - on the glory of choosing your own life, even when it takes ruthlessness to do it.
But now it occurred to her that he had only written about the beginning of the journey. He had never shown the consequences of the choice - never shown what happened to these people ten and twenty and thirty years down the line. And she felt that she was seeing the consequences , every day, in what she was seeing of him.
You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice - over the weeks and months and years to come - requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn’t a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it ~~