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Ironically, I’ve never been very good at describing physical objects or landscapes in my writing, in translating what I can literally see in words. I lack the patience, I’ve always thought, but I think, too, it’s a hesitation to overtake a certain imaginative impulse on behalf of others, an impulse makes reading so special, to not try and cram into a reader’s head my vision of what is before me. There are limits to this, of course, but I don’t take pleasure in describing a desk or a person’s hair color because often those details are irrelevant, and I can trust the reader to fill in the gaps while I try to focus them on what I believe is really important in a scene or image, which can be sound or feeling or smell or what someone has said. Making a mind’s eye image is a pleasure for many readers, though likely not all. I don’t care to read a lot of these details myself, usually, which can feel like a kind of clutter, self-indulgent at their worst. I prefer to see for myself, whether that is literal or imaginative. Yet, reading the artist Anne Truitt’s Daybook recently brought up another possibility. There are pages in which she talks about her childhood discovery of being nearsighted as formative in not only her literal perception of the world but in her orientation to it in a larger sense. I underlined multiple pages on this, which I have condensed here.
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