(He opens a tome and begins.)
It says: “In the beginning was the Word.”
Already I am stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act.

— Goethe, Faust

Das Wort erstirbt schon in der Feder . . .

— Goethe, Faust

MEPHISTOPHELES:

Du bist am Ende — was du bist.

— Goethe, Faust

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try to catch time by the tail.

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

— Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea

The time has come to prove by deeds that mortals
Have as much dignity as any god,
And not to tremble at that murky cave
Where fantasy condemns itself to dwell
In agony.

— Goethe, Faust
tr. Walter Kaufmann

Each man kills the thing he loves.

— Oscar Wilde

In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.

— Marcel Proust

None of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home.

— Walter Benjamin

Aber die Sonne duldet kein Weißes
(but the sun will not suffer the white)

Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein
(Here I am human, may enjoy humanity)

— Goethe, Faust
tr. Walter Kaufmann 

There is no perception that is not full of memories.

— Henri Bergson

FAUST:

I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And, worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through —
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before.
Called Master of Arts, and Doctor to boot,
For ten years almost I confute
And up and down, wherever it goes,
I drag my students by the nose —
And see that for all our science and art
We can know nothing. It burns my heart.

— Goethe’s Faust,
trans. Walter Kaufmann

Despite Mormonism’s entrenched homophobia, and Quinn’s unsparing, clear-eyed assessment of Mormonism’s faults, his faith in the religion of Joseph Smith remains undiminished. “I’m a radical believer,” he says, “but I’m still a believer.” He seems to be one of those rare spiritual thinkers, as Annie Dillard puts it, who possess “a sort of anaerobic capacity to batten and thrive on paradox.”

— Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

By Richard Rhodes
wsj

Once a year I give a seminar on writing to a group of honor students at Stanford University. For the shock value, I edit a few pages of the senior theses that they’re writing. I cushion the blow—red correction marks and rewrites dense on every page—by telling them that my own work looks the same way after I edit it.

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed. Writing is a craft and, like all craft, proceeds by stages: conception, material selection, rough shaping, detailed shaping, sanding and finishing. (That’s for writing nonfiction, which feels like woodworking to me. Writing fiction is more like throwing clay, and writing poetry more like watchmaking.)

I’ve puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I’ve identified its source: It’s their self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, inside our heads. That’s what consciousness is.

Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking. But it doesn’t end there.

We don’t talk to ourselves in finished sentences. We use shorthand, code words, private references. We hear other voices in our head as well, the voices of those who have influenced us so deeply that we carry them around with us like phantom companions.

This internal monologue makes good sense to us but very little sense to a reader when it’s spilled onto the page. It’s like a strange dialect, only distantly related to the common tongue that we share.

When I’m teaching students, then, I focus first on voice. It’s never occurred to most of them that they use a constructed voice when they write. Because they’re transcribing their self-talk more or less, they think that they’re writing in their “own” voice.

I point out that they use different voices for different forms of writing, from school papers to emails home to cellphone texts. I tell them that the voice of a school paper is an invented voice, as much as the voice of the narrator in a novel.

The work of writing, I tell them, isn’t simply copying down their self-talk. If they think so, I say, try transcribing a conversation and see how much is redundant or extraneous.

No, the work of writing is deliberately choosing a voice, a fictional construct, in which to argue or narrate, and then, through draft after successive draft, composing and editing a translation of their self-talk into prose that others can read and understand.

This editing doesn’t mean that they have to leave out the personal or the idiosyncratic. It just means that they have to rewrite their self-talk to open up what’s private and eliminate what’s extraneous, using the voice that they’ve chosen to anchor the text in a specific point of view.

I tell them about the voice that I chose for my history “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” I knew that I would be writing a story that was both tragic and epic, and I wanted a narrative voice that could carry that much weight.

To shape it, I made two choices: to follow the style of the great English historians by using balanced, periodic sentences (sentences that unfold gradually, saving the subject and verb for the end) and never to use a contraction.

Miraculously enough, some of the students get the point and trim their self-talk to the wind of clear discourse. They write better as a result.