One s Own Desert

                One’s Own Desert




I increasingly feel that, for a person who chooses the Word as a way of speaking to the world, there is perhaps one stage that cannot be avoided.


                One’s own desert.

I have spent a long time trying to understand what that means.

The desert is not necessarily misfortune.

It is not necessarily tragedy.

And certainly it is not some compulsory school of suffering, after which one is somehow awarded the right to call oneself a writer.

No.

I think it is much more complicated than that.

We do not always understand — and certainly not immediately — that we have entered our own desert.

Sometimes we only understand it years later.

Sometimes never.

And not everyone comes out.

But there is another thought here, perhaps more difficult still.

One cannot leave one’s desert as the same person who entered it.

No one ever comes out of it unscathed — if they come out still human.

Because the desert, when it truly becomes our own, strips away many of the things we once held on to.

Other people’s voices.

Their expectations.

The image of what we are supposed to be.

Sometimes even our own illusions about ourselves.

And at some point there remains only one very simple and very frightening question:

What in me is truly mine?

That is why I do not believe that suffering, by itself, creates anything.

It can make us bitter.

It can break us.

It can silence us.

It can leave a human being in the desert forever.

But if, while passing through it, a person manages not to lose the ability to see, to feel and to question, then what happened to them may sometimes become something else.

Experience.

Memory.

Understanding.

And sometimes — a word.

And a word that has truly passed through life carries a different kind of weight.

But here I have to take one step back.

Because this is not only about writers.

Life writes upon every human being.

On some, in capital letters.

On others, almost imperceptibly.

On others so deeply that they themselves may not know for years what has been written inside them.

After the desert, everyone writes.

But not everyone writes on paper.

Some write with their lives.

Some with their actions.

Some with their silence.

Some leave what has been written only within themselves.

And perhaps the hardest work begins even before writing:

to read what life has written within us.

Because the language in which that message is written is probably the most difficult language of all.

It is our own inner language.

We often know how to read other people.

We know how to read books.

We know how to explain other people’s actions.

But reading ourselves is much harder.

And perhaps the writer does not begin at the moment when a person first sits down at a desk and writes.

Perhaps the writer begins when a human being tries to read what has happened to them, and then discovers within themselves the desire and the ability to translate it into words that another person can read.

In that sense, perhaps a writer is simply a translator.

A translator of their own life.

But even here, there is no guarantee.

Not everyone who has crossed a desert becomes a writer.

Not everyone wants to speak.

Not everyone is able to speak.

And perhaps they should not have to.

The desert is not a diploma.

Suffering is not a merit.

And no one is obliged to turn their pain into a work of art in order to justify its existence.

Everyone has their own path.

If someone wants to reach Rome, they may leave from Paris, from Normandy, from India, or take a completely different road. Each person’s journey will be their own.

Perhaps the same is true of the person who one day comes to the Word.

But one simple thought keeps returning to me:

“You cannot step into the same river twice.
But you cannot step into it twice as the same person either.”

We are accustomed to hearing only the first half.

The river has changed.

But so have we.

And that is why the same book, read at twenty and then again at fifty, can become two completely different books.

I understood this particularly well with Dostoevsky.

I could read his novels when I was younger and be convinced that I understood them.

Then, years later, I could open the same page — and suddenly discover something completely different there.

It was not Dostoevsky who had changed.

I had.

Perhaps this is why we sometimes think that an author is foreign to us, that an idea escapes us, that a book has nothing to say to us.

Perhaps the problem is not always the book.

Perhaps we simply do not yet know how to hear it.

And here I feel like casting my net a little farther, into that immense cultural circle in which human beings have been trying to understand themselves for thousands of years.

We find similar questions in very different people, in very different eras, in very different languages.

But each of them arrives at those questions by their own road.

And perhaps that is why the image of the desert speaks to me more and more.

Not as a place where a person must necessarily go.

Not as an ordeal that must be endured in order to receive a reward.

But as a space where, one day, too many familiar answers disappear.

And the human being is left alone with himself.

Sometimes he understands it immediately.

Sometimes ten years later.

Sometimes only when he looks back.

And sometimes he never comes out.

This is where the figure of Martin Eden becomes particularly disturbing to me.

Not simply because he is a writer.

And not even simply because his story ends tragically.

What frightens me is another question.

Did he really come out of his desert?

Or did he simply reach its end after losing, somewhere along the way, the person who had entered it?

Because one can succeed.

One can be recognized.

One can reach the summit one dreamed of.

And still discover that there is no one left inside to rejoice in the victory.

Then the question becomes much larger than literature.

It becomes a question about the human being.

What does it mean to come out of one’s desert still human?

I probably do not have a definitive answer.

And perhaps there should not be one.

Because each of us must one day read our own page.

Not someone else’s.

Our own.

And only then decide what to do with it.

Some will keep it within themselves.

Some will tell it to another person.

Some will turn it into a book.

Some into an action.

Some into silence.

And perhaps one day someone will find words that did not even exist for them before.

Then another strange question appears.

Where does that language come from?

Perhaps we do not create it entirely by ourselves.

Perhaps life teaches it to us little by little.

Perhaps we spend our whole lives collecting it piece by piece — from love, loss, encounters, mistakes, books, solitude, joy, fear and hope.

And then, one day, we discover that we are able to tell another person something we were not previously able to tell even ourselves.

And then the Word becomes a bridge.

Not simply between writer and reader.

Between two human lives.

Perhaps that is why one woman who lived almost four thousand years ago has accompanied me for so long.

Enheduanna.

Not as proof of this idea.

Nor as its explanation.

Rather, as a witness.

She lost her temple.

She lost her power.

She lost her position.

She was exiled.

She knew her own desert.

And we do not know what happened inside her during each of those days.

But we know one thing.

She came out of that desert with the Word.

And perhaps that is why her voice still resonates.

Four thousand years later.

Not because she defeated the desert.

But because, having passed through it, she did not allow the desert to defeat the human being within her completely.

And perhaps everything else begins there.

Not with the writer.

Not with the book.

Not with success.

But with a human being who, one day, tries to hear what life has written within them.

And decides — if they still have enough strength — to translate it into a language that another human being can hear.