Thursday, August 19, 2021

Thursday Thoughts...

“Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?” 

 Margaret Atwood

This one turned my head inside out a little bit. 

I think about ghosts appearing when you die; and so was not sure how how a present day person writing would ponder their words as the voice of a ghost.  In order to write you must be alive I assume? Even now I am still pondering!

The questioning of whether a ghost would have a voice made me wonder why one would choose this as a way to express something.

As I delved a bit deeper I realised that the words are in a novel called MaddAddam, and without having read the book, perhaps they make less sense to me - they maybe perfectly positioned within the novel and its characters and within that context make perfect sense!

Perhaps it is about the words being written being more like an echo through time when you die. That they are what remains of a person?

Perhaps that makes the most sense. I'm still not sure about any of it, but there you go!


Headstone, Canisbay Church of Scotland graveyard.



4 comments:

  1. F - that is very hard to fathom. B

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  2. I was reluctant to write about this line as I am a huge fan of Margaret Atwood's books but she totally lost me with the trilogy beginning with Oryx and Crake, continued in The Year of the Flood and concluding with MaddAddam, the characters are cardboard cutouts made to fit a predictable role in a plot that drives her environmental message home with a lump of 4 x 2. The good news is once she got these books out of her system, The Tent, The Heart Goes Last, Moral Disorder & The Stone Mattress are brilliant.

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    1. I have read a few of Atwood's, but not this trilogy and it sounds like I might avoid it. I am pleased that she got it out of her system. I am still rather betwaddled by the quote but am going to stick with it that the words left behind are like the voices of ghost!

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