Enough

I am finishing a book, which means I am doing the only part of writing that has never gotten easier. Producing sentences is, after all, easy—so easy any AI can do it. But writing, like living, is mostly editing. What no one warns you about is that editing, unlike life, has no natural end. There is always another pass, a footnote that could be firmer, a paragraph that could be tightened one more turn, a transition that almost works, an idea that could be even weirder, more human. The manuscript never says stop. You have to say it. And saying it, I think, is often the hardest sentence in the process. 

I have spent my last two summers in Sète, Valéry’s birthplace, and so found myself drawn back to him, and to his Au sujet du Cimetière marin. There he wrote: Aux yeux de ces amateurs d’inquiétude et de perfection, un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé,—mot qui pour eux n’a aucun sens,—mais abandonné. My translation would say something like “in the eyes of those given to restlessness and perfectionism, a work is never finished—a word that, for such people, means nothing—only abandoned.”

One reaches a point at which looking at the work is borderline unbearable, and calls that “finishing.” The truest signal that a manuscript is done, I have come to think, is not satisfaction at all. On the contrary, it is a very specific kind of disgust, a soft rejection. When I can no longer read my own paragraph, I get the anxious feeling that the time has come. The revulsion tells me that the work and I have gotten as far as we can get together.

I keep, as a private warning, the figure of Frenhofer, the painter in Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu—the great master who has labored ten years over a single portrait, a woman he calls the most beautiful thing ever painted, and whom he will let no one see. When two younger painters are at last admitted to the studio, they find a canvas buried under at least a decade of revision: a wall of paint out of which, at the very bottom, there emerges one exquisitely rendered living foot. Everything else has been worked to death.

Cézanne, who understood the danger better than anyone, is supposed to have pointed at himself and said: Frenhofer, c’est moi. That is the temptation: the narcissistic conviction that the thing in front of you is, or is about to be, a masterpiece, and therefore deserves one more month, one more year, one more layer. The lazy writer abandons the book too early. The Frenhofer in us never abandons it at all, and calls that fidelity.

So finishing is a discipline in both directions. I have written elsewhere that thinking, like editing, is a kind of erasing—Plato’s exaleipho, the wiping-away of what should not remain. But you can wipe a thing out entirely. The art is in knowing what to remove, and in letting the imperfect thing stand. Past a certain point, revision is subtraction dressed up as care.

What finally lets me stop, I think, is remembering that a finished book is not a perfected object. It is one I have agreed, for now, to be seen with. To hand a book over is to consent to its imperfection in public, which is also to consent to having been a particular person, with particular limits, at a particular time. That consent is a form of trust: in the reader, who will finish the book in ways I cannot control; in time, which will judge it without asking me; and in the next book, which cannot begin until this one has been let go.

Indeed, there is, or should be, always a next book. That is the quiet consolation of working inside a long project: the failures I am finally releasing are not fully lost. They become the openings of the volume after. As I once wrote of an old folder full of half-finished drafts, they have their own way of reminding me that they are essentially already done—that each time I return to them, I simply get to know them better. The book I am finishing now is imperfect. It is also, at last, enough. I am going to let go of the foot and hand the whole flawed thing over—before I do to it what Frenhofer did.