Searching for David

Each of Anne Fadiman’s writing classes began with a quote and reflection. Am I a vomit-drafter or a diamond-polisher? In other words, a writer who lets loose and cleans up later, or one who measures twice and cuts once, unharried? What is my David?

From Anne, I learned of a saying, often attributed to Michelangelo: How do you carve a statue of David? You take a block of marble and cut out everything that isn’t David.

David was a metaphor for the essence of an essay, its thrice-distilled spirit that, like all spirits, warms not so much as it burns. A supposedly one-sentence summary, yet for all its worth, inadequate to capture the breadth of our song—why else would we write?—a motive that hints at the symphony to come. (Or in the words of a friend, “An annoying-ass ear-dwelling jingle.”)

Mallet and chisel in hand, what emerged from my marble tended to resemble neither David nor Goliath but, well, a rock. I start with all the words I know and take away the ones I don’t mean. But unlike Michelangelo, I can put them back at the push of a button. I can create them anew. Which meant that, more often than not, I was lost. How do you know what isn’t David? How did I, 21 then, 24 now, know anything at all? My friend, Matt, reminded me of Picasso’s attempts to distill the essence of a cow. Eventually, you end up with an empty page.

I try not to write unless I have something to say. But it’s hard to know when something is worth saying. My father says that we live in an age where we talk too much and read too little. I’m not sure I agree, but in any case, I like to make my words count. Having spent the past several months heading full-tilt for Step 1, the inertia of my post-exam days (though few) is unsettling. I ought to say something. It comes out in sputters.

I think I am still looking for David. Once Protean, now man, he assumes a form I can more easily grasp: medicine, gynecology, writing, compassion. To leave, as Daenerys said in last week’s Game of Thrones, the world better than we found it.

I used to think that writing, as with life, as with the pursuit of all things, was made possible at the exclusion of others. Perhaps it was once so. Ink bleeds; a crevice in stone is not easily undone. But with fatality I see also fluidity, a work of addition rather than reduction, a cow of infinite strokes that eludes capture yet. Fear not the mallet and chisel. Marble is costly; storage is cheap. And unlike Michelangelo, we can put it back.