Of apples and friendships

That the day falls on a Tuesday the 13th doesn't bother me, but I confess I hold at least three superstitions: I wouldn't walk under a ladder, even if I were dead, I'd never ask another diner to bring me the salt shaker, and my years in Russia left me with the habit of never shaking anyone's hand under a door frame when entering or leaving a house. As for broken mirrors, I'm dazzled by Rodoreda's novel. When it comes to writing, on the other hand, I have few manias: I sit at the table and do what I can, depending on the wind blowing or the time available.

In the ink industry, scriptorium rituals are not lacking. Truman Capote, so often mentioned in recent weeks in relation to the moral (or otherwise) limits of literature, detested the presence of yellow roses or the accumulation of more than three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. The author of the irrefutable In Cold Blood never tackled or completed any project on a Friday, and refused to dial a phone number if, when adding its digits, the result seemed ominous. It was his way of warding off existential anxiety, the fear of failure, and the slide into oblivion.

We humans share the need to find meaning in chaos, to seek connections between experiences even when there's no logic to support them. We repeat gestures, words, and small rituals, as if by doing so we can control uncertainty.

Humans share the need to find meaning in chaos.

As for bizarre habits, that of the Romantic poet Schiller, another obsessive. His friend Goethe revealed that he kept a pile of rotten apples in one of his cellar drawers, convinced that the stench of decomposition—via ethylene gas—stimulated his creativity: rot as a muse.

Speaking of apples and friendship, the Argentine Juan Forn tells a beautiful story in The Man Who Was Friday: when Zola's father dies, the family moves to Aix-en-Provence, facing financial hardship. The boys tease him at school for being poor and strange, and only one classmate stands up for him: Cézanne. The young Zola leaves a basket of apples at his door. They become friends. Over the years, things change, and it is Zola, now a successful writer, who convinces the shy Cézanne to move to Paris. But the friendship gradually frays—jealousy, differences of character, who knows—until the final estrangement when Zola writes a novel about an artist misunderstood in his time —The Work, it's titled—that hurts Cézanne. What does he do then? He begins to paint still lifes with apples, as if returning, one by one, those from that basket that once sealed a friendship in Aix.

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All this is to say that, even if we seek support in ritual and superstition, there's no secret to making ideas come to fruition other than constant work and openness to the unexpected. Rick Rubin says this in The Act of Creating: A Way of Being . That, and the patience to pick apples from the mud of memory.