Annotated table of contents: gorse no. 6
‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’
Editorial
Je est un autre
1.3 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges contains the doubly memorable statement, from which I copy the following words: ‘All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare […] The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous.’
1.4 ‘I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.’
Essays
Children & Art by Lauren Elkin
There’s a line in the opening number of Merrily We Roll Along, the musical by Stephen Sondheim, that asks: ‘How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?’ I’m quite sure that I would not be where I am—which, for the record, is a flat in Clerkenwell, London, on a Sunday morning in January, before anyone else is up—if my parents had not taken me to the theatre to see Sunday in the Park With George one day in 1984. Something hit me in that play, I can trace all of my passions back to it, all of the ways I have related to the world, and understood my purpose in it. That day I fell in love with the theatre, and more specifically with musical theatre; I fell in love with art, with the nineteenth century, with Post-Impressionism, with France. I didn’t know I would go on to study theatre, or teach art history. I didn’t know I would move to France. I didn’t know you could move to France. I couldn’t foresee that one day I would live between Paris and London. I didn’t know you could live between two cities. I didn’t know I would become a writer, and understand the retreat from the outside world, hoping that the people you love understand, feeling the weight of their sadness, their disappointment. I didn’t know I couldn’t have the kind of life I wanted in New York, that the pressure would be too great to have a conventional job, to settle into a conventional life. To become a writer, I had to move to Europe. But to choose that life, I had to give up the one I was born with.
