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INTRODUCTION BY ANDRÉ ACIMAN
INTRODUCTION BY
André Aciman
Write for yourself, they say. But that’s such nonsense. We wouldn’t know how. Even in our most private journals, either encrypted or kept under lock and key, we are not really writing for ourselves but for strangers who are so much like us that they might as well be altered selves bearing our first and last names. Why else do we spellcheck our diary entries, or make sure that our sentences are never fragmentary or written on the fly, but retain the accuracy and syntactic polish of what we mean to communicate?
We know a lot about ourselves. We know our worst faults; but we don’t always like to be reminded of them. We may confide to our closest friends, to our partners, to our shrinks, but always with a touch of adornment, discretion, and adjustment, and when making our foulest and most shameful confessions, the cadence in our sentences is one of the many ways we burnish what we’re reluctant to fess up. But when we wake up in the middle of the night and know who we are, it’s an entirely different matter. We are horrified by what we’ve said, done, confessed, imagined, dreamt, and swear we’ll never write down. Still, we know that by the time we are fully awake the ugly truths we’ve dredged up at night will show themselves to be ore, not dross. The burnishing is art; the rest, as we soon realize, is incidental.
We alter experience not because we can’t live with it, but because we want to grasp it, and to do that we step back, not draw closer, which means writing as if for someone else, even if that someone else is us. We want to display what hurt us, or why we continue to be unhappy, or why we’re not always loved by those we love; but we need to do it on the slant, otherwise what we put down on paper is flat and lusterless—read: inauthentic. Art is what makes us authentic, not truth.
We arrive at ourselves vicariously. Ultimately, we write not for others, not for ourselves, but for the person we will be, a sort of transfigured and enduring self. A diary entry that is hastily jotted down may be totally inscrutable in two days and certainly in two years. But one that is crafted is a letter to the person we’ll be one day and who would otherwise be unable to recall that special inflection on a beloved’s face when she’s just about to smile, the feel of the first gust of spring wind cutting through winter, the deafening rasp of crickets after we’ve put out the campfire.
We write, not for the us writing things down, but for the us who hasn’t read them yet.
I offer heartfelt congratulations to the ten winners of the 2022 Whiting Award. The world awaits your work.
ANDRÉ ACIMAN was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name and Find Me as well as of Out of Egypt and other novels, essay collections, and novellas. He received a Whiting Award in 1995. Aciman is the director of The Writers’ Institute and teaches Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
