L'occhio del ladro

You always have to be careful around writers, my friend laughs during a presentation of his latest novel. They steal everything you say, especially from other writers. The moment you start telling a story – “Oh man, guys, you’ll never believe what happened to me the other day-“ they turn to you with this little gleam in their eye, l’occhio del ladro, the eyes of a thief. “Oh?” they say. “And just what did happen to you the other day?” “Uh – nothing, I swear!”

Bad writers borrow, great writers steal. I’m pretty sure I’ve both appropriated and misquoted that line from Stravinsky. Who took it from T.S. Eliot, who I would call the original source if he hadn’t probably lifted it from someone else anyway.

I’m not a writer, but I want to be one someday. This blog is my gym and sandbox: the current objective is simply to get ideas on the page and hit “publish”, exposure therapy for the terminally self-critical. I deliberately make my terrible first drafts see the light of day because otherwise I’ll never write a single word.

And I steal. I’m a literary kleptomaniac. My last piece was at least halfway a stylistic ripoff of the friend I quoted above. The one I had to take down under threat of being fired from my day job was a blatant imitation of David Sedaris. I’m imitating someone else now, but so poorly that out of respect for him I won’t even give a hint as to his identity.

In my self-directed introductory course on writing, the current topic is myself, in all my helpless neurotic glory. I’m training my occhio del ladro to see scenes, characters, themes, metaphors and lines of dialogue in everyday life. I’m training my ego to both shrink (stop with the perfectionism and just write something down, sbagliando si impara) and expand (you deserve to try your hand at writing, at least until someone tells you otherwise.)

A few weeks ago I was on the train downtown. In the course of one ride I saw three beggars stumbling through the car, a functionally atonal mariachi band singing of their longing for Mexico, and a well-off couple in their late thirties arguing venomously while their eight year old daughter clung to the pole and stared into space.

A young Orthodox Jewish man got on the train at the next stop. He looked about thirty-five, dressed like a shabby professor with wire-rimmed glasses perched distractedly on his nose, his traditional curls undone, a velvet cap like a French poet’s beret balanced on his head. He was carrying an enormous leather-bound book at least five hundred pages long, which he read from back to front with an illuminated expression of pure joy and wonder in his eyes. He was straight out of a vignette by Sholem Aleichem.

He got me thinking about a Jewish folktale I’ve always liked. There’s a little town somewhere in Poland where everything is going wrong. The harvest is bad, the economy is tanking, relationships are falling apart and people’s resentment of each other is causing life to spin out of control. So they invite a famous old rabbi to advise them on how to save their community. He walks around for a few minutes then invites everyone to the town square to hear his wisdom. He smiles. “One of you,” he says, “And I won’t say who, is the Messiah.” And he leaves.

Of course, the people of the town are at first furious because that isn’t advice, but over the next days and weeks and months they find themselves treating one another with greater respect and also being kinder to themselves. Because, after all, one of them was the Messiah. And things in the little town start to slowly improve.  

In the oxygen-starved atmosphere of the subway tunnels, my inspiration sparked. Here was an essay. Deep in the city’s underground, the lonely and the forgotten and the sad and the poor, the rabbi who walks among them radiant with joy quietly whispering one of you is the Messiah, one of you is the Messiah. I started digging in my memory for other folktales – Christ or Saint Wenceslas in disguise among the commoners, Buddha probably doing something similar, the Greek gods constantly dressing up as mortals to mess with everyone. One of you is the Messiah, the blind man rattling change in a coffee cup, the little girl exhausted by her parents’ anger, the lonely immigrants, all of you are the Messiah –

And then the train doors opened and a fistful of cold air came in from outside, slapping me awake. That was a terrible idea for an essay. As profound as Paulo Coelho’s middle school diary and as original as the inevitable fifth remake of Spider-Man.

I looked guiltily from side to side to make sure no one had overheard my thoughts, and slunk embarrassedly off the train, the pages of my notebook still blank.

***

Apologies to Fabio G. for stealing the line about how writers steal each other’s lines. We only rob the ones we love.