Nick Flynn just published an interesting article titled “The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Torture” in the February 2008 issue of Esquire<\/i>. On the one hand, the piece is exactly what the subhead describes it as, a story about the author’s trip to Istanbul to listen to accounts of torture from former prisoners at Abu Ghraib. But the essay does its job is a very rambling way, offering poetic asides about memories, perceptions, families, and dreams.<\/p>\n
In one section, Flynn describes his meditation retreat with a Vietnamese Zen master:<\/p>\n
Thich Nhat Hahn says it is a mistake to say, “The rain is falling,” to say, “The wind is blowing.” What is rain if it is not falling?<\/i> he asks. What is wind if it is not blowing?<\/i> The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This passage had nothing to do with writing; it was meant to speak to the impermanence of our existence. But it also gave me a little “Aha!” moment. Have I been guilty of writing a sentence in which the wind blew? Did I ever say that the rain was falling? Was there really a need to say so? What else would they be doing? Wind blows. Rain falls. And words can be redundant.<\/p>\n
It reminded me of the need to prune my prose. Not something I always do wisely here<\/i> … but you know what I mean.<\/p>\n
Perhaps that’s an inconsequential and insulting moral to take from such a horrifying essay, but I’m a writer. I commit such crimes all the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nick Flynn just published an interesting article titled “The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Torture” in the February 2008 issue of Esquire. On the one hand, the piece is exactly what the subhead describes it as, a story about the author’s trip to Istanbul to listen to accounts of torture from former prisoners […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[323,398],"class_list":["post-12454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-esquire","tag-nick-flynn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12455,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12454\/revisions\/12455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}