{"id":132257,"date":"2018-12-25T13:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-12-25T18:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132257"},"modified":"2018-12-20T12:23:58","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T17:23:58","slug":"notes-nearing-ninety-learning-to-write-less-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/25\/notes-nearing-ninety-learning-to-write-less-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes Nearing Ninety: Learning to Write Less"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>We\u2019re away until January 2, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday!<\/i><\/p>\n<p><em>Donald Hall, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/26\/donald-hall-1928-2018\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine<\/a>, was a prolific poet, essayist, and editor whose work has had an enormous impact on American letters. He was <\/em>The Paris Review<em>\u2019s<\/em><em>\u00a0first poetry editor, and he served as the U.S. poet laureate. His<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/interviews\/2163\/donald-hall-the-art-of-poetry-no-43-donald-hall\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Art of Poetry\u00a0interview<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<em>appeared in our Fall 1991 issue.<\/em><em>\u00a0Before his death, he compiled one final book of essays, <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hmhco.com\/shop\/books\/A-Carnival-of-Losses\/9781328826343\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety<\/a><i>, an excerpt from which appears below.\u00a0<\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/donald_hall_1.jpg\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_131669\" style=\"width: 378px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/donaldhallbaseball.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-131669\" class=\"wp-image-131669 \" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/donaldhallbaseball-300x195.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"368\" height=\"239\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/donaldhallbaseball-300x195.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/donaldhallbaseball.jpg 710w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-131669\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Donald Hall, 1977.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>When I was sixteen, I read ten books a week: E.\u2009E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Henry James, Hart Crane, John Steinbeck. I thought I progressed in literature by reading faster and faster\u2014but reading more is reading less. I learned to slow down. Thirty years later, in New Hampshire with Jane, I made a living by freelance writing all day, so I read books only at night. Jane went to sleep quickly and didn\u2019t mind the light on my side of the bed. I read <em>The Decline and Fall of the\u00a0<\/em><em>Roman Empire<\/em> and six huge volumes of Henry Adams\u2019s letters. I read the late novels of Henry James over and over again. After Jane died, I kept reading books, at first only murderous or violent writers like Cormac McCarthy. Today I am forty years older than Jane ever got to be, and I realize I haven\u2019t finished reading a book in a year.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/08\/notes-nearing-ninety-learning-to-write-less\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read more &gt;&gt;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Hall, who died in June this year at the age of eighty-nine, compiled one final book of essays before his death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1536,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44292],"tags":[34900,7434],"class_list":["post-132257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2018","tag-a-carnival-of-losses","tag-donald-hall"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - 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