Roman Payne's Blog
October 9, 2018
Why Your Goal in Life should be to Write a Book
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,� writes Montaigne. The wise also encourage bold and courageous action rather than weak inaction.
“Fortune favors the bold,� says the Latin proverb, and it is interpreted as being so self-evident that the United States Army adopted it as their official motto.
Search on the internet for quotes on ‘the meaning of life� and the prevailing thought is that one’s purpose is to attain happiness. Aristotle claimed this purpose for man some 2,300 years ago and no one has successfully refuted it since. Although the word Aristotle used was not ‘happiness� but ‘eudaimonia� (or “the flourishing life.� Unlike ‘happiness,� which can mean a mere moment of ‘pleasure� (“God, this wine is nice!� or “Heavens, do I feel happy tonight!�), the flourishing life is one where joy and pleasure mingle with a ‘prolonged� sense of self-fulfillment — where past work and effort (often including suffering) has bloomed into present pleasure and fulfilment, which will not diminish in the future nor result in a negative future experience (like the ‘come-down� experience following the pleasure of drinking wine).
Eudaimonia tells you that you are happy in the present and the future; and that any past sufferings undergone to attain this present-future happiness, though hard at the time, have now become happy because of the happy present and future they have yielded (thus, through eudaimonia, we can actually ‘modify the past!�
So, what makes one’s life eudaimonic? The two obvious positive types of ‘good lives� are ‘lives to envy� and ‘lives to admire.� Wise men and women throughout time praise the latter and insult the former. The life to envy is the ultimate playboy lifestyle: the life lived by Hugh Heffner, Don Juan, and Donald Trump. Lives to admire, by contrast, were lived by Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Theresa. Gandhi spent a total of seven years of his life in prison. And anyone looking at photos of Abraham Lincoln before and after the four-year American Civil War will see a man who had aged at least ten years during that time (maybe even ‘four-score� as many years!). And there is no need to recount all of the hardships Mother Theresa faced. These people whose lives we admire have risen to near sainthood; and although wise men and women suggest that these ‘lives to admire� are holy, literary quotes stress that “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting� (Mary Oliver) and console us with words like “beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.� (“Desiderata� by Max Ehrmann.)
And so it is good to ‘be yourself,� to be bold and courageous, to live a life that others admire rather than envy. But what, then, is the ‘purpose� of life? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “the purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful.� Darwinists would argue that our purpose is to reproduce (create life before we ourselves die), and countless parents would agree. Yet are there not countless ways to create life?
Is not ‘teaching� creating life? A teacher takes a being who would otherwise go through life unconscious and breathes consciousness and awareness and reflection into that being. So, while two parents may have ten children who receive no education and live lives without awareness, a single teacher may help hundreds of students discover themselves and become aware of their lives. But when the pupils die? There goes the lives these teachers created. True, the enlightened beings may have begat enlightened beings, but the teacher’s message that is as unique as his or her DNA is diluted, rewritten. Writing a book, I argue, is the way to create immortal life — for your words will live forever within the safe walls of quotation marks.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.�
John Milton argued that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.�
A classic example of defending ‘writing a book as the reason to live� appears in the 1960 French film À bout de souffle when a fictional novelist is interviewed and asked what his greatest ambition in life is. The novelist responds laconically: “Devenir immortel, et puis, mourir.� (“Become immortal, and then, die.�) *
(Essay by Roman Payne, author of "The Wanderess"[].)
(Those of you who are writers, Payne is currently assisting the new members of Literature Monthly. Apply for membership at: )
October 4, 2018
Seeking Talented Authors
Hurry, because our client list is filling fast.
Apply at:
October 3, 2018
Limited space, Authors should apply quickly
Attention: very limited space! Sign-up quickly...
Literature Monthly and I are taking on publicity for a very limited number of writers. Since we are going to keep our client list very short, it's a good idea to apply as soon as you can...
For only $45 you will receive a one-year membership to Literature Monthly, which includes consulting and support, special opportunities, and a free social publicity campaign going out to 35,000+ literature lovers.
Apply now at:
September 27, 2018
Authors looking for Publicity, Try this...
September 16, 2018
Authors: Here's a great free publicity opportunity for literary professionals...
An author's club which I'm proud to be a part of called Literature Monthly is currently giving a free social media publicity campaign to each new member who joins starting today (Sept. 16th). I'm not sure when the offer ends. Soon, I think.
...This free campaign goes out to over 35,000 book lovers via Instagram and Facebook (+ a few other channels. Twitter is excluded, apparently Twitter people don't read whole books).
To qualify for membership, you should either be a professional author (novelist, poet, etc.) or other pro in the literary business (agent, publisher, etc.); if you're not yet making an income through books, you can still be accepted as a member if you are actively working to make books/literature your primary future career.
Literature Monthly provides its members with free book/author/business publicity and other helpful services to advance their careers. Best of all, it provides a great support system for us literary folk; since we know that the writing business can be a lonely and discouraging world for those of us who don't have other literary professionals helping them out.
So, I hope to have you for a confrère/consœur soon. Here is the link to join:
*
September 14, 2018
Why Your Goal in Life should be to Write a Book
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,� writes Montaigne. The wise also encourage bold and courageous action rather than weak inaction.
“Fortune favors the bold,� says the Latin proverb, and it is interpreted as being so self-evident that the United States Army adopted it as their official motto.
Search on the internet for quotes on ‘the meaning of life� and the prevailing thought is that one’s purpose is to attain happiness. Aristotle claimed this purpose for man some 2,300 years ago and no one has successfully refuted it since. Although the word Aristotle used was not ‘happiness� but ‘eudaimonia� (or “the flourishing life.� Unlike ‘happiness,� which can mean a mere moment of ‘pleasure� (“God, this wine is nice!� or “Heavens, do I feel happy tonight!�), the flourishing life is one where joy and pleasure mingle with a ‘prolonged� sense of self-fulfillment — where past work and effort (often including suffering) has bloomed into present pleasure and fulfilment, which will not diminish in the future nor result in a negative future experience (like the ‘come-down� experience following the pleasure of drinking wine).
Eudaimonia tells you that you are happy in the present and the future; and that any past sufferings undergone to attain this present-future happiness, though hard at the time, have now become happy because of the happy present and future they have yielded (thus, through eudaimonia, we can actually ‘modify the past!�
So, what makes one’s life eudaimonic? The two obvious positive types of ‘good lives� are ‘lives to envy� and ‘lives to admire.� Wise men and women throughout time praise the latter and insult the former. The life to envy is the ultimate playboy lifestyle: the life lived by Hugh Heffner, Don Juan, and Donald Trump. Lives to admire, by contrast, were lived by Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Mother Theresa. Gandhi spent a total of seven years of his life in prison. And anyone looking at photos of Abraham Lincoln before and after the four-year American Civil War will see a man who had aged at least ten years during that time (maybe even ‘four-score� as many years!). And there is no need to recount all of the hardships Mother Theresa faced. These people whose lives we admire have risen to near sainthood; and although wise men and women suggest that these ‘lives to admire� are holy, literary quotes stress that “you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting� (Mary Oliver) and console us with words like “beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.� (“Desiderata� by Max Ehrmann.)
And so it is good to ‘be yourself,� to be bold and courageous, to live a life that others admire rather than envy. But what, then, is the ‘purpose� of life? Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “the purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful.� Darwinists would argue that our purpose is to reproduce (create life before we ourselves die), and countless parents would agree. Yet are there not countless ways to create life?
Is not ‘teaching� creating life? A teacher takes a being who would otherwise go through life unconscious and breathes consciousness and awareness and reflection into that being. So, while two parents may have ten children who receive no education and live lives without awareness, a single teacher may help hundreds of students discover themselves and become aware of their lives. But when the pupils die? There goes the lives these teachers created. True, the enlightened beings may have begat enlightened beings, but the teacher’s message that is as unique as his or her DNA is diluted, rewritten. Writing a book, I argue, is the way to create immortal life — for your words will live forever within the safe walls of quotation marks.
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that “a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.�
John Milton argued that “books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.�
A classic example of defending ‘writing a book as the reason to live� appears in the 1960 French film À bout de souffle when a fictional novelist is interviewed and asked what his greatest ambition in life is. The novelist responds laconically: “Devenir immortel, et puis, mourir.� (“Become immortal, and then, die.�) �
(Essay by Roman Payne, author of the influential novel, The Wanderess [].)
You can follow Roman Payne on Facebook at , on Instagram at , and have a message delivered to him here:
Or those of you who are writers, Payne will be giving writers� workshops hosted by Literature Monthly. Become a member at to sign up.
January 14, 2018
On the Pleasures of Life
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You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination, giving your hearts and your bodies to all that your hearts and bodies desire. Live in your imagination. Live the life that only a god could dare to live, for you are a god or a goddess. You are immortal in that you are conscious at this moment while this moment stretches on for all of eternity. The gods of Greece were silly in their playfulness, they were always cheerful and happy—simply for the fact that they knew that they were deathless. So, you too are deathless. So mock life with an air of superiority; and be cheerful and joyous as you wander in the wilderness.
And wander far, my friend! Ô wander far! Wander through cities and countries wide, knowing that everywhere you go, the world is on your side. Be at peace with all things and keep your eyes bright with wonder. Smile with sensuality at those of the sex you hold beloved, for it costs you nothing to give them romantic dreams. Each encounter you have with your beloved sex contains elements of the exotic, the erotic. The glances with the stranger on the street or subway car are glances of wonder, want, and desire—a fire between the legs.
And when you next make love to a woman or a man, treat your lover as though she or he is a goddess or a god. Adore every part of your lover’s body. Worship them. Inhale their odor with passion while you imagine the zebras on the beaches of Africa and the flowers in the jungles of Brazil.
Worship your lover’s sex. Kiss it as though it were the flesh you need to devour. Lap its moisture like the man laps at the fresh, cool water of the oasis he finds after crawling on his hands and knees through the desert for seven days, parched and panting. Admire your lover’s body, for it is perfect, as is your body. Kiss your lover’s body with gratitude, adore it with gratitude, for this person is giving you the gift of opening his or her nakedness to you, exposing to you their vulnerable innocence. They can be hurt by you, but they trust you, be kind.
For we are all children on this exotic Earth and none of us know what we are here for or why. Thus, in joy walk along; take part in dance, and sing your song. Yet, never try to bind an hour, to your borrowed garden bower; nor shall you once entreat, a day to slumber at your feet. For days aren’t lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o’er crests of trees, to none belong.
Get drunk, feel free, get high, while the hours of life before you fly. Don’t worry to ask yourself why you do the thing you do. For you are a masterpiece of nature and life—your mother’s sacrifice. And your dreams will become your life, and they will be bountiful, once you know that you are beautiful. So, how shall beauty you achieve? Simply laugh, and smile, and simply breathe.
January 1, 2018
The Birth of a Quote: “She was free in her wildness…�
“She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.�
Roman Payne (“The Wanderess�)
How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,� Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature.
I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature� when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander.
I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages.
What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again.
Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!�
(-Roman Payne, January 1, 2018, Marrakech, Morocco)
* * * Ask the novelist and poet who wrote this famous quote a question. Ask him anything at: /author/359352.Roman_Payne/questions
The Birth of a Quote: She was free in her wildness...
. .
- Roman Payne (“The Wanderess�)
. .
How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,� Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature.
. .
I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature� when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander.
. .
I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages.
. .
What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again.
. .
Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!�
. .
(-Roman Payne, January 1, 2018, Marrakech, Morocco)
. .
. .
* * * Ask the novelist and poet who wrote this famous quote a question. Ask him anything at: /author/3593...
. .
The Wanderess
. .
Roman Payne
December 28, 2017
Quote: "You must give everything..."
"You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination."
- Roman Payne
Roman Payne-
