When I was seventeen I thought loneliness was the prize you paid for creativity. It was okay to be estranged from the world if out of that separation a story grew. And it was okay to feel the painful absence that came from longing for something powerfully beyond my reach if poetry could rise from that same place. Now, nearing sixty, I do what I can to fend off loneliness and seek to create instead as a member of a community responsible for other members.But I wonder sometimes if I did not lose something necessary in this life-long journey from self to other. It was certainly painful, that youthful angst. But there was also that sense that I was digging, uncovering, deepening. There was separation and isolation and vain pride at being different. Yes, all that. But there was also this crazy sense of sticking stubbornly to the path you were discovering, the road not taken. If I could join that seventeen-year-old and the sixty-year-old, I would keep the sense of being special and throw out the sense of being better. I would be unique and I would be like everybody else. I would keep the longing for some unknown other in the midst of my belonging to all others. If I could take something from that seventeen-year-old boy and infuse it into these old arms, it would be this: his fear of being shallow and trivial, of wasting life; his courage to face loneliness rather than be who he was not; the passionate sense that he was preparing, becoming, learning, getting ready for his appointed task.
February 23, 2013
January 13, 2012
Letter to a Young Author
Friend,
I am glad to hear about the joy you’ve found in writing. You ask if this is not a sign that you are meant to make of writing your life’s occupation. I don’t know. Is writing your vocation? If I may borrow the words from another author friend: “Vocation is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s great need.” You have found gladness, but are you writing to the world’s great need? The world’s great need will be met when you write the one novel you came into this world to write. It is the one that scares you the most, the one you think no one will publish and if it is published then no one will read and if it is read then no one will understand, except perhaps another soul like yours. Spend your life trying to write this one book. You may never get there. What matters is that you get closer and closer to it with every book you write. Direct your life so that on your deathbed you can say I never gave up trying. Don’t be afraid of failure. And if you fail, look for the door that opens to the place you were looking for all along. Have the courage to write with beauty. Let your prose strain towards poetry. Sometimes there is no other way to say what you need to say. But remember always the honest beauty of bread and water. Believe in the invisible. Have an unshakeable faith in the existence of the soul, yours and the person you write for. If people call your writing religious because of this, so be it. Find others who have made or are on the same journey and cherish them as fellow travelers. Rejoice in their effort as if it were your own. There is no room for envy on this trip. Build a harbor to protect your gift, but make sure your daily catch comes from the open ocean. Find a job that can be friends with and not jealous of your vocation. If you are fortunate enough to make a living from your writing, you’ll need to be even more attentive to your calling, for its voice is hard to hear amidst the clanging of praise. Be lighthearted but don’t forget the seriousness of it all. The tragedy and glory of life is that it can be squandered and loss and waste are real. Be humble. Let your vocation be a prayer no one hears but you. Important as your writing is, it is not your whole purpose. Most of all, be open to love and be grateful for it in whatever form it comes. And if love doesn’t come, love nevertheless. Love, its gladness and its pain, will show you what the world most needs.
