WEBVTT

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Well, the point I'd
like to make out

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of all sorts of
possibilities is this.

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Sometimes someone
says, when you write,

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do you do it with metaphors,
figures of speech?

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And my feeling is,
about this, no.

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No, I'll put it to you this way.

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Writing for me is very
much like talking.

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That is the-- and we're
all experts at this.

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Among friends I mean, we
practice all our lives

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talking that novel we're
living from morning till night.

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And so we get plenty of
practice, and we're experts.

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And writing is just notation for
the talk we're such experts at.

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So if I start a sentence,
even like this one

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that I'm starting now, without
ever having said this sentence

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exactly this way before
in my whole life,

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I know because I'm such an
expert speaker, the way we all

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are, that I'll be able to find
my way through this sentence

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even if I keep throwing
in all these modifiers

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and hesitations.

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And finally reach the end.

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It's great, I
don't have to plan.

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That none of us would have to do
that, if we're relaxed enough.

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I was a little
afraid in the middle

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of that to lose the thread.

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And maybe I did, but
anyway, forgive me if I did,

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but we forgive each
other and we can do this.

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But as you start, those
words are not drafted.

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They volunteer, I don't
know where they come from.

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They're there,
they're just waiting.

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And every now and then,
you may hit a place

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where you don't have exactly
the right word or the phrase,

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and you do a little side slip,
because of the emergency.

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And well, that's
just what I did.

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You just do a little
side slip, that is you

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use some kind of an image
and it works out all right.

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And you go on.

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Now if you weren't in
motion, if you weren't doing

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that, you wouldn't
meet the emergency

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and you wouldn't
have the inspiration,

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or whatever it is
that lets you do

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these trivial things like
side slips or metaphors,

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or whatever.

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Well, I thought there were
other points about that,

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but I want to go on to a--

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I want to hasten on
to something called

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"At The Un-National Monument
Along The Canadian Border."

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"This is the field where
the battle did not happen,

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where the unknown
soldier did not die.

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This is the field
where grass joined

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hands, where no monument stands
and the only heroic thing

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is the sky.

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Birds fly here
without any sound,

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unfolding their wings
across the open.

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No people killed or were
killed on this ground.

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Hallowed by neglect,
and an air so

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tame that people celebrate
it by forgetting its name."

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Now the point I would
like to make about this

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is, the trivial is
writing is-- and I

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think it's quite
trivial like talking,

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and we forgive each
other for this.

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Every now and then in our
talk or in our writing,

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we may find ourselves
beginning to verge

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into some kind of process that
has a kind of feedback for us.

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And it could be that we could
find our way to formulations,

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to interchanges with each other.

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That would enable us
to live, and sustain

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ourselves and the
feelings we like to have.

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But without the
kinds of feelings

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that have those
terrible side effects,

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those fatal side effects, that
some kinds of formulations

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have.

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Like declarations, and
manifestos and constitutions,

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but instead, some kind of
immediate human realization,

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words.

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