Norman Mailer: Wisdom Told in Quotes

From Mailer's Collected Letters (edited by J. Michael Lennon)

Our Border Collie Franky’s debut

Here’s a little something I wrote which is connected to Mailer’s thought. And then it’s all just highlighted quotes from his collected letters (1940-2007).

(Me): As far as writing fiction or anything long (including nonfiction): I just haven’t had the heart in it lately. I told B yesterday about my constant/consistent “low-level depression” which I basically always have. I think this is true. “Happy” is not a normal state for me. Just isn’t. Never has been. I simply don’t see what there is to laugh at or smile about.

That’s not to say I’m always angry, sad, bitter or depressed. Not at all. Like I said it’s low-level. But it is consistent. It’s as if I very rarely ever get beyond a certain emotional/psychological threshold. Much of this is genetic, but also environmental (as a child) and also just my organic nature. This means on some level that I’m always tired, physically, and exhausted emotionally, and that normal, everyday things, aka the boring, average routines of life, are harder for me than for most typical people.

Writers are like aliens in many ways. We don’t exist in the same universe as other people. We think and see things differently. Not better or worse, just different. It’s almost as if we speak a different metaphysical, spiritual language. We’re freaks in many ways: Truth-tellers and liars simultaneously, and the sort of people who can’t avoid facing Death in all its fascinating and terrifying shades of gray.

What am I trying to say? Well, just this: Writers are weirdos. Amoral, for sure. Lookers. Visionaries. Thinkers. Listeners. Egocentric. Childish. Selfish. Brilliant. Special. Different. All of it. Narcissistic. Complex, odd human beings. The cutouts, the rejects, the outsiders. Morally ambivalent. We’ll record whatever feels right, whether it’s a brutal rape or a murder or a lovely, beautiful moment between mother and son. We care about ideas and about experience and about emotions. We’re strange, most of us. Concerned with death and demons.

We’re like photographers trying to capture that one vital moment, captured permanently in time. We want to leave our ultimate mark on society in whatever way we can. We are professional fibbers, exaggerators, storytellers. We’re certainly not “bad,” but it’s never fully obvious that we’re good. A hard dose of male and female, weak and strong, loving and hating, obsessed and emotionally vulnerable yet also repressed and private and stoic. A bag of gangrenous contradictions, a wall of fear, a sense of the Immediate “I” which is always hovering within our hearts and souls.

~Me

MAILER’S WEIRD WISDOM