Dr Naomi Wolf Christmas Newsletter

I just received this newsletter from Naomi Wold which I really want to share as I loved what she is sharing. I copy and paste the bit I liked best and the put the link so you can read the rest yourself if you like. She also shares a poaem by Walt Whitman, which would deserve its own post really.....

My father, the departed and much-missed poet Dr Leonard Wolf, believed that once you write something, it no longer belongs to you.

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It belongs, as he taught me and his many students, not to the author, but to the universe.

He also believed that even if a writer had just one reader, that was enough; the right words for the right reader meant that an entire universe was created. He was a Blakean, after all, and saw “Heaven in a Wild Flower.” He made literary use of the Talmud’s teaching: that if you save even one life, you have saved a world.

My dad also distinguished between what he called the “career” of the writer, and the “life” of the writer. “Careers” he held in little esteem; they came and went; the acclaim or the disdain of the world were meaningless to him.

But: were you truly living “the life of the writer”? That was the question about which he cared; his eyes sparkled when he asked it. And the “life of a writer” set a high bar.

The question meant: were you, every day of your working life, doing your utmost to tell the truth as you knew it; to make the manifestation of it in prose — he loved saying that lovely word, “prose” — beautiful?

Were you expressing what had to be expressed? Without narcissism, without laziness, without hiding, without false notes of pretentiousness?

Read the rest here on substack: