Reincarnation

I thought long and hard about reincarnation last night, and as everyone else who has ever thought about it, I had fun flattering myself over and over as I tried to figure out who I used to be. Exhilirating, yet exhausting. I must have suffered greatly, because I don't suffer in this lifetime. Sometimes I wish I did, then I'd have something to write about.

It came down to this: I was either Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, or James Baldwin. I most definitely was not Tolstoy, or Jane Austen, or a Bronte. And I most definitely was not anything but a literary genius.How great does it feel to tell yourself that you matter as a writer, in any way you possibly can? When the little voice that never dies trashes what you know is good and denounces it as hopeless, doesn't it help to shut it up by shoving the fact that you were once Ernest Hemingway in its ugly little face? After all, any reincarnate of any literary genius is still a literary genius. Everyone knows that.