"the whole world is a work of art"

tomorrow i'm taking owen to camp nana & papa so i can write in a quiet house, distraction free, and bring five years of research and writing and reading to a close--or a hiatus of some sorts.  and i want to remember the writing process as learning how to write with--indeed being inspired by--a precocious four year old who leaves dinosaurs from the late creaceous under my books and stickies covered in zeroes to remind me of infinity on my keyboard. . .

when we took s-dog out for a walk this afternoon i explained that mama was nearly finished with her "book" and just needed a couple of days to check the sentences and write the conclusion.  rather than simply mm-hmming me he engaged what had only recently come to the fore--my writing life.

oh, well mom, what's your favorite chapter?

hmmm, i think it would have to be virginia woolf.

oh, i thought your WHOLE book was on virginia woolf.

well, she's very important.  but i have other chapters too.

oh, tell me about each chapter.

. . . and so owen can perhaps say more about twentieth century women writers than many of my college students could. . .

and when i told him i'd still have to finish the book he nodded and said:

oh, you mean  like put a pretty cover on it and staple it together and make an index.

exactly.

and after the walk, after paninis for dinner, while looking through his favorite of the dinsoaur encylopedias (the dk pocket super book from uncle ryan) he suddenly closed his book:

mom.  you have to finish your book. because you need to write another one.

i smiled.

you need to write an encyclopedia of flowers.  here (flipping through the dk book) like this--see how it has a table of contents, and a glossary.  you could do one like this, but about flowers.

and it isn't all like this, of course, but this is want i want to remember.  this is exactly the moment virginia would mark as a shock--it is this moment i'm pasting right from my woolf chapter:

This moment at the window is indeed what Woolf had been defining as a moment of being— “that the individual in his daily life is cut off from ‘reality’ but at rare moments receives a shock’” . . .of transcendent vision—the definition of which she added to throughout her writing life.  In “Sketch of the Past” she explains her philosophy “that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art”