The Writer - Reader Paradigm

This weekend, my friend sent me a passage from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. It reads:

I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader’s pride mixed with much enthusiasm. But whereas pride usually develops into a massive sentiment that weighs upon the entire psyche, the touch of pride that is born of adherence to the felicity of an image remains secret and unobtrusive. It is within us, mere readers that we are, it is for us, and for us alone. Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living out temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

As I read (and re-read) this passage, I can’t help but feel like it was meant for me. I think of this in the context of one specific book in mind, Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, because it is a book of short stories I am constantly reading and re-reading. As I write this, I can tell you exactly where it is on my nightstand. The third book down in a stack of four, under a fiction book I’m borrowing from my friend Lindsey and my journal (freehand), sitting on top of my second journal (prompts). Its pink spine feels more like leather than paper and every other page has creases from being dog-eared. So – what does my comfort book have to do with this passage that was sent to me on Sunday afternoon?

When it comes to Damaged Glory, I have never read writing more immersive in my life. Something I find unique about short stories is it tends to be the words themselves that tell the story rather than the plot or narrative. Damaged Glory has some stories where I genuinely don’t know what’s happening (re: sacrificial goat wedding), but I know exactly what they are saying and how it makes me feel. It reminds me of a very specific type of writing that I’ve learned about not from books I’ve read in the past or high school English classes, but from my advertising courses. Copywriting.

I became interested copywriting during my junior year account management course, learning about manifestos. We read the classics up on the board: Nike, Levi’s, Apple. The reason they interested me is much of the same reason reading books interests me: I was drawn to the idea of building a world so defined and thematically consistent that it was reflected in even the language. In my later classes, I would go on to write my own manifestos (one of which can be found under my Goodles work) and fall further in love with both the idea of them and their writing style.

I said that I knew how the stories from Damaged Glory made me feel, and I would be lying if I didn’t say jealous. In the writer-reader paradigm, I am jealous of Bob-Waksberg’s ability to wield words so well that the plot itself is a second thought – I am jealous that he is the one writing it, and I am the one reading it.

Is Gaston Bachelard right, am I reliving out temptations to be a poet? Is writing in my journal, on this website, being jealous of other’s writing, some kind of second-thought grasp of a dream I never realized, never chased? I don’t know, but I know this paradigm goes beyond whether I consider myself a reader or a writer. It begs the greater question of the implications of how we define ourselves. Am I a reader who aspires to write or a writer who hides behind the cover of being a reader? Is it one or the other, or can it be both? Do I have the ability to change it?

Replace the words reader and writer with any two descriptors, and this is the internal debate I have had most of my life: who am I?

In a sense, broadening this question gives me comfort, because I have the ability to define it. After all, I have been on both sides of the writer-reader paradigm, haven’t I?