Revealing And Concealing Poem by gershon hepner

REVEALING AND CONCEALING

One rationale of writing is revealing
the author’s thoughts and deepest feelings, but
more often they are hidden, and concealing
becomes its rationale, because we shut
our minds not only to our lovers and
our friends but to ourselves and hide
in order that no one will understand
the truth about us that we can’t abide.
Why bother then to write at all if we
are writing to conceal our thoughts, why not
avoid all writing, letting no one see
evasions with which we confuse the plot?
My friend, the answer’s blowin’ in the wind
that sometimes carries all our thoughts away,
but sometimes blows back all that we have sinned
like a broken record that we must replay.
We can’t know all things like the foxes that
Berlin contrasted with the hedgehog which
is focused on just on, and like a cat
find in concealment of our thoughts our niche.

In Haaretz on May 15,2009 (Forgetting Paris) Maya Sela reviews a book by Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

Barbery was born in Casablanca and raised in Paris. Her first book, Une Gourmandise, was published in Hebrew by Zmora-Bitan in 2002 (it will be published in English this year by Europa Editions) . She is a professor of philosophy, and taught philosophy when she had no choice and had to make a living. Today, she lives in Japan. This would come as no surprise to anyone who has read her book: It reflects her total enchantment with Japanese culture, which she contrasts repeatedly to the French culture she despises…. With the success of her book she has given up teaching. 'I can now devote myself entirely to writing. This makes things much easier for me. 'There are certain aspects of teaching that tempt me, but I can't stand academia. The great philosophical texts are jewels, and they resonate within us deeply and continuously. But my philosophical studies completely contradicted this intellectual life: The university was sclerotic, the history of philosophy was static, and arrogant rhetorical posturing displaced authentic thinking.'
The two heroines conceal their intelligence. Is writing an act of revelation or concealment? ''The Elegance of the Hedgehog' is a novel; the characters and the situations are purely fictional. And for me, writing is intensely pleasurable - inter alia, because it allows you to live a life that is different from your own. I do not think that writing is an act either of revelation or concealment; it is a force for the sublimation of events and emotions, for the transformation of the writer's intimate states of consciousness into universal feelings. 'This novel is a reflection of our personal tastes, those of my husband and myself - of our spiritual world, and of our cultural, literary, philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities. All of these underwent a metamorphosis through the magic of writing and became literary conventions enabling us to share them with people we do not know.”

5/15/09