Writers often talk of the torments of writing, of “the fear of the blank page,” of nights waking in a cold sweat because suddenly they see the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities, of the story that they have been writing, sometimes for years. This distress is certainly real, but I insist also upon the pleasures of creation, of inventing an entire fictional world out of thousands of facts and details. There is a particular kind of wonder that I feel when a character I have invented begins to overtake me, to run ahead and pull me forward: suddenly this imagined character knows more than I do about its own fate, its own future, and also about other characters in the story, and I must learn to follow, to catch up. In a way that I do not fully understand, my invented person infuses me with the materials of life, with ideas, with plot twists, with understandings I never knew I possessed. A creative work represents, for me, the possibility of touching infinity. Not mathematical infinity or philosophical infinity, but human infinity. That is, the infinity of the human face. The infinite strings of a single heart, the infinity of an individual’s intellect and understanding, of her opinions, urges, illusions, of his smallness and greatness, her power to create, his power to destroy — the infinity of her configurations. Almost every idea that comes to my mind about the character I am writing opens me up to more and more human possibilities: to a lush garden of forking paths. “To be whole, it is enough to exist,” wrote the poet Fernando Pessoa. This wonderful observation pours salt on the wounds of every writer who knows how difficult it is to translate a character born in the imagination into a character that contains even a particle of the Pessoan “wholeness,” even a fraction of the fullness of life that exists in one single second of a living person. It is this wholeness — made up also of infinite flaws, with defects and deficiencies of both mind and body — to which a writer aspires. This is the writer’s wish, this is the writer’s compulsion: to reach that alchemical develop-ment at which suddenly, through the use of inanimate matter — symbols arranged on a page in a particular order — we have conjured into being a life. Writers who have written characters and dissolved into them and then come back into themselves; who have come back to find themselves now composed in part of their character; who know that if they had not written these characters they would not truly know themselves — these writers know the pleasures to be found in the sense of life’s fullness that lives inside each of us. It is almost banal to be moved by this, but I am: we, each and every one of us, are in fact a plenitude of life. We each contain an infinity of possibilities and ways of being inside life. Yet finally such an observation is not banal at all. It is a truth of which we regularly need to remind ourselves. After all, look how cautiously we avoid living all the abundance that we are, how we dodge so many of the possibilities that are broached by our souls, our bodies, our circumstances. Quickly, at an early age, we ossify, and diminish ourselves into a single thing, a “one,” a this or a that, a clearly delineated being. Perhaps it is our desire not to face this confusing and sometimes deceptive welter within us that makes us lose some part of ourselves. Sometimes the unlived life, the life we could have lived but were unable to live, or did not dare to live, withers inside us and vanishes. At other moments we may feel it stirring within, we may see it before our eyes, and it stings us with regret, with sorrow, with a sensation of squandered chances, with humiliation, even with grief, because something, or someone, was abandoned or destroyed. It might be a passionate love that we renounced in favor of calm. Or a profession wrongly chosen, in which we molder for the rest of our lives. Or an entire life spent in the wrong gender. It could be a thousand and one choices that are not right for us, which we make because of pressures and expectations, because of our fears, our desire to please, our submission to the assumptions and the prejudices of our time. Writing is a movement of the soul directed against such a submission, against such an evasion of the abundance within us. It is a subversive movement of the writer made primarily against himself. We might imagine it as a tough massage that the writer keeps administering to the stale muscles of his cautious, rigid, inhibited consciousness. In my own case, writing is a free, supple, easy movement along the imaginary axes between the little boy I still am and the old man I already am, between the man in me and the woman in me, between my sanity and my madness, between my inner Jew-in-a-concentration-camp and my inner commander of that camp, between the Israeli I am and the Palestinian I might have been. I remember, for example, the difficulties I experienced when I wrote Ora, the main character in To the End of the Land. For two years I struggled with her, but I was unable to know her completely. There were so many words surrounding her, but they had no living focal point. I had not yet created in her the living pulse without which I cannot believe in — I cannot be — the character I am writing. Finally I had no choice but to do what any decent citizen in my situation would do: I sat down and wrote her a letter, in the old fashioned way, with pen and paper. Ora, I asked, what’s going on? Why won’t you surrender? Even before I had finished the letter,
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence