Deciding to Write

Decisions are only very small things. It can take a little less than a moment for the whole course of your life to be muddied, or cleared up. Less than a second, less than a moment, less than an instant. Decisions we make without mulling over, decisions that one foot should land there, or that that piece of paper should be thrown in the bin. Small things. Larger decisions, for which we write pro-con lists and catalogue inventories and gnaw our nails. Large decisions which bare upon us without us even realising - unexpected, unplanned for. Often unwelcome. Only when we accept responsibility for our decisions will we begin to work to be free. I think that's what that book on Desire was about, but it's more than that. I know, I know we can never truly be free. I know that it's pointless wanting so much, that it's the state of the human condition, to be tied down to laws and to the earth and to the people around us. I know that small tastes of freedom are special, like the ones on your tongue on a summer's day at the beach. At a glimpse of something spectacular that washes the slate clean. I know that there are many things (most of the things) that I wish for which will never happen. I know all this. But I also know that deciding to decide for myself is one of the most powerful things of all. I know that being tied down is not an excuse to look for excuses. It is a knowledge to be worked with (against) or else it will become just another thing that has tied me down.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it - this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town and in the most differing stages of education. If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe.
- Henry James in The Art of Fiction