Roland Barthes.

I picked up A Barthes Reader today after getting into a discussion with some of my Wolfe Institute co-workers. Almost instantly, I felt like I just took down a massive chocolate shake, which really only happens when I have a chocolate shake, and when I find something within myself in relation to a great writer. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, writes: 

“Throughout his late writing Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the excerise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes a role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise.” 

This is something that I’ve exercised for a while, to put it simply—as one’s mother might tell us—if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. In my waning days here in New York City, I find myself trying to celebrate and go forth with as much energy as possible. There is barely any time left. Enjoy your life, Sontag seems to be saying, pay attention to it. 

When I started reading this introduction there was a girl who got on the train with me, she had a black backpack and on it, stenciled in pink, “Cupcakes are the new black.” She was going through Poets & Writers Magazine with a pen, constantly working. We never stop working do we? Expanding, learning, seeing where we can put our thoughts. 

“Writing is Barthes’s perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no once since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in  Mythologies of the writer as seen by others, that is the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different version of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness…”

All of this puts me back to where I started here in New York, when Miller told me to “get a notebook and write down everything you see here,” because before I know it—I’ll stop paying attention. Like this renews my sense of celebration, of taking note and the joy in my life here. Now that I’ve figured what I enjoy, I’m going to go away and spread it around, see what can be done with it in a place I love. Saying, “We’re only alive once! Do what we love! Write about it! And then share it and see if you can help someone get to this point!” Chappelle has it right, “It’s a celebration, bitches!”