NB: This is a crosspost from Inverse Square–yesterday evening, in fact. (The world kinda collapsed in around me and I didn’t have the time to close the loop then.)
This has been a bad news day, at least for my particular obsessions. I’ll post in a bit about Trump’s King Cnut moment–today’s declaration that climate change ain’t a problem, and hence all US regulation that presumes it is will die. The decision to reverse the EPA’s endangerment finding about greenhouse gasses will be tested in court and may fail there (though the Corrupt Six on the SC are not, to put it mildly, jurists that inspire confidence in the rule of law). But the potential for truly awful consequences is there and I ain’t happy.
But…one of the things about being human is that other humans have lit candles against the night, and we can take joy in that light even though the darkness is there. So as I was thinking about this week’s respite essay it struck me that I imagined myself into being a writer long before I ever seriously applied ass to chair and took on the actual work required. And that imagining sustained me as I encountered the various ways the search for words becomes a tangled labyrinth in which one struggles to find a path through.
What launched that imagining? Reading, of course, which is hardly a revelation–but in particular sudden moments in reading when the raw power of language suddenly manifested itself. So I offer this up in the hopes that y’all might use a break from present horrors and dwell in a moment when some aesthetic experience knocked the legs from under you.
Enough preamble…here’s the post:
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I knew I had to be a writer long before I actually did the work…laying words down on the page and moving them about until I truly knew what I thought, felt, meant.
How did I know this?
Because of the way my body responded when I came across a passage that regardless of its content—the plot—would ring out, vibrating in my gut as much as my head.
I can remember a few of those moments now, half a century and more on. There was the time I was deep in the dumps at the end of my second year of college and for some reason picked up Middlemarch. School was over; this wasn’t for a course; I wasn’t a literature student. Just happened across a copy and for no reason I can remember decided that the thing I needed to do while feeling completely at right angles to myself was read a gazillion page nineteenth century novel.
The passage that knocked me off my feet came when Eliot broke the fourth wall to demand the reader’s sympathy for Causabon as a person whose self-preserving myths were crumbling just as he needs them most. That short moment was brilliantly written and smart, emotionally and intellectually. My depression lifted—really, just about in the moment of my reading that page and a half. Why? Because I suddenly recognized that it was possible to use words as lenses through which to see the world in previously unsuspected ways.
Then there was that brief exchange in the middle of Rudyard Kipling’s Captain’s Courageous that, again, was only minimally involved in the plot, but still stopped me dead the first time I read that book as an adult. Here it is:
Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined Disko’s peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack’s swinging overhand when the lines were hauled, Manuel’s round-shouldered but effective stroke in a dory, and Tom Platt’s generous Ohio stride along the deck.
“’Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut,” said Long Jack, when Harvey was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. “I’ll lay my wage an’ share ‘tis more’n half play-actin’ to him, an’ he consates himself he’s a bowld mariner. Watch his little bit av a back now!”
“That’s the way we all begin,” said Tom Platt. “The boys they make believe all the time till they’ve cheated ‘emselves into bein’ men, an’ so till they die—pretendin’ an’ pretendin’. I done it on the old Ohio, I know. Stood my first watch—harbor-watch—feelin’ finer’n Farragut. Dan’s full o’ the same kind o’ notions. See ‘em now, actin’ to be genewine moss-backs—very hair a rope-yarn an’ blood Stockholm tar.”
There we all are: cheating ourselves into our grown selves—and so until we die, pretending…
Image upon image and a moment of insight that makes this book something very much more than just a Boy’s Own tale. Early on I didn’t take any lessons from it; all it did was make make me want to put pen to paper (keys to screen?). It was just so good it made my fingers itch with desire make anything even remotely as explosive.
One more. This is what I read when I was trying to write for my college newspaper a remembrance of my father on the tenth anniversary of his death. I was stuck. What to say about someone I’d last known when I was ten?
Then I read this:
Indirectly, though, he [my brother] was present in many of our conversations. Once, for instance, my father asked me a series of questions that suddenly made me wonder whether I understood even my father whom I felt closer to than any man I have ever known. “You like to tell true stories, don’t you?” he asked, and I answered, “Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.”
Then he asked, “After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it.”
“Only then will you understand what happened and why.
“It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.”
That’s almost the end of Norman Maclean’s novella, “A River Runs Through It.” I read the whole story in one sitting. I literally could not put it down. It’s a beautiful piece of course, tightly written, plenty of incident, more than a little humor to leaven the foreshadowed tragedy. And what it says in lines quoted above was clearly relevant to the task I had found impossible before I played hooky with a little fiction, and an almost unbelievable straight shot afterwards.
But looking back, what that brief excerpt did to or in me was to see in the act of writing the most extraordinary power I could ever desire: the ability to make worlds, explore them, and in doing so, understand what happens and why.
So that’s it from me. How about you?
What encounters with art—any art, words, sound, image, movement, all of the above—have taken you out of yourself? Where do you go when you need a moment of joy, or a sense that we do have the power we need so desparately at the current moment in this vale of tears?
And yeah, this thread is open, as usual.
Images: John Singer Sargent, Man Reading, undated.
Edma Morisot (yup…Berthe’s sister), Fisherman by a river, undated.
Lyrebird
Thanks especially for your inclusion of the Edma Morisot painting – total first for me!
Tom Levenson
@Lyrebird: Me too, to be honest. Saw Berthe Morisot’s linked painting of her sister a few weeks ago in SF. First time I heard of Edma.
stinger
Ever since I first read Middlemarch, in my teens, I’ve thought it the greatest book I’ve ever read. In part because of Eliot’s suddenly making me feel sympathy for Causabon. Thank you for featuring it.
Tom Levenson
@stinger: Middlemarch is certainly in the conversation for the greatest novel in the English language.
It just knocked me over when I read it for the first time when I was ~20.
scav
@Tom Levenson: Was that at the Manet & Morisot exhibition? That one sounds fantastic, and then with the whole Edma and Berthe relationship your painting link brought to attention? I may have just discovered a whole new rabbit hole of interactions to explore. . .
Percysowner
Well, It’s pretty certain we will keep the Senate seat from New Mexico Republicans Fail To Get A U.S. Senate Candidate In New Mexico
Heidi Mom
“And the war came.” Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
“Like many Scottish fathers before him, he had to take what comfort he could in the knowledge that his son had died fighting.” Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It (as best I can remember it).
No One of Consequence
Well played, Tom.
I paused and read these slowly. Sounding them out in my head. Repeating them in whispered voice to try to hear the meter and tenor.
Dialogue is best enjoyed as such, for my personal tastes at least.
Wisdom that is at once succinct and profound seems more prevalent, if only in the brevity may it be remembered.
Still, as one of too many words, I thank you for yours. They have helped me today.
-NOoC
Even merely good Art can have a profound impact on someone’s day/heart/mind/soul. Take your pick.
Great Art can knock the Heavens awry.
Tom Levenson
@scav: Yes it was. I wrote about it here a couple of weeks ago. Just an amazing exhibit and if you have a chance to see it in San Francisco or Cleveland, you should.
Tom Levenson
@No One of Consequence: Thank you.
Gin & Tonic
For me, Bach’s Mass in B Minor. The first Kyrie may be the most transcendent music ever written.
Tom Levenson
@Gin & Tonic: Yes. Yes it is.
bbleh
“A River Runs Through It” is a great book. It moves.
I do a lot of verbal communicating — instructing, writing, haranguing, even lunatic blogposting. And I would argue even that math is a language, and I find it both intrinsically beautiful and a very effective way to communicate.
BUT I agree with @Gin & Tonic: that what really MOVES me in ways I almost can’t understand is music. (And I even play keyboards.) You want inspiration, emotion, even deliberate manipulation — yikes. Words connect for me intellectually (!) and emotionally, but music does it almost before I’m even aware of it. (And yeah, Bach fan. But math guy, duh.)
Joshua Todd James
Jesus, Captain’s Courageous is a book that affected me so deeply, so very, very fucking deeply, I nearly don’t have words to express it… I cannot say it is THE book that spurred me to become a writer, but it is absolutely one of the influential novels I can never forget, and its themes echo in all my work to this very day.
And, as you say, it’s so beautifully written it vibrates me whenever I read it.
I love THE JUNGLE BOOK, etc, but this one makes me weep nearly every single time.
Van Buren
The short passage that blew me away as a young ‘un was:
At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.
From A Farewell to Arms, and to me, perfectly encapsulated the indifference to death that marked the war.
cope
I was drawn to writing by reading my father’s many “Pogo” books. This led to Lewis Carroll and later, the poignant World War I poets and writers, then “Moby Dick” and even Shakespeare.
The realization that didn’t really come to me until college was that words are like bricks…the number of patterns is infinite. The complexity and beauty of these patterns is infinite as well.
Aziz, light!
The stupids may not believe in climate change, but climate change believes in them. In time its unpreventable and unmitigated effects will wreck ecosystems and economies on every continent.
Tom Levenson
@Joshua Todd James: I so agree. Captain’s Courageous is such a jewel box of a book. Every beat fits with the next. It’s like that Japanese joinery that uses no fasteners; it just fits.
RaflW
Very interesting question! I was a tot when I read Watership Down – maybe eight years old. I can still recall a few of the feels from curling up with that book 50+ years later.
Probably a common experience (given the fandom), my first trip through Middle Earth as a pre-teen (?) was a big deal as well.
But for writing that actually knocked me off my feet, I think of Edmund White. Probably The Beautiful Room is Empty, though three decades later I can no longer tell you what moments or scene. Paul Russel’s Salt Point comes to mind as well.
In recent(ish) fiction, Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski was just packed with powerful, spare, moving writing.
eta: Working in a queer bookstore in the early ’90s, I got to meet Edmund White – he did an event in our store. For a lover of reading, that was a Top 5 starstruck moment. A kind, gentle man.
RevRick
@Tom Levenson: The King Cnut moment often gets misunderstood as him getting high on his own supply. What really happened was that courtiers seeking to curry favor told him that since he was king, he could do anything he wanted. That led to him ordering his throne to be taken to the water’s edge, where he commanded the tides to stop. The tide came in, his feet were submerged, at which point he ordered his throne be taken back to his chambers. The message he was communicating was that he saw through their flattering bullshit.
I learned this when I used this anecdote when writing a letter to the editor after Zeldin announced his intention to reverse the Endangerment Finding.
Hungry Joe
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RevRick
I was a bright, precocious boy who did well in school in subjects that interested me and indifferently in those that didn’t. And English was one of the latter classes. I habitually procrastinated with reading assigned novels. It was if English was a foreign language. I went to college, majoring in Chemistry. But in my junior year I felt a call to ministry.
Oh, the irony. Now, every week I had to write and deliver a sermon. And so I had to take a crash course in literature. Where before literature felt like a chore, now it felt like a lifeline. I read to gain a wide variety of perspectives on human thought and behavior. I read to learn how to use language as a means of communicating a message. I read to reflect and ponder. I read to expand my imagination. I read to know myself.
West of the Rockies
Lovely post, John!
I remember seeing Casablanca at about 14 and recognizing what a man was supposed to be: honest and brave, doing what’s right even if it requires great sacrifice and risk.
Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return (commonly known from its film title Somewhere in Time), The Great Gatsby, and Earth Abides made me yearn to write and be a story teller.
West of the Rockies
@RevRick:
I just want to say I really dig your presence here.
Just look at that parking lot
This may be a bit ( or a lot) superficial, but when I need a break from whatever is pressing in that day, I read short stories , or just parts of ones, that are just a bit skewed from reality. Not fantasy, but regular places & people that have odd occurrences happen. A favorite is The Shinagawa Monkey by Haruki Murakami. A man staying at a Japanese inn/hot springs, makes an acquaintance with a monkey, that can talk, who works there. Here’s a bit of their encounter.
— There wasn’t a table in the room, so we sat down, side by side, on thin zabuton cushions and leaned back against the wall. The monkey used the opener to pop the cap on one of the beers and poured out two glasses.Silently we clinked our glasses together in a little toast.
“Thanks for the drinks”, the monkey said, and happily gulped back the cold beer. I drank some as well. Honestly, it felt odd to be seated next to a monkey, sharing a beer, but I guess you get use to it.
This story , and others like it, has just the right amount of absurdity/inanity that can get me to ease up and shake off the day’s nastiness.
Miss Bianca
@stinger: I read Middlemarch again last year for the first time since I was a teenager. Suffice it to say that even tho’ I still despised Casaubon, I was much, much more sympathetic to the plight of an old person dying before their life’s work was completed – and even more to the plight of the person who loses their faith that their life’s work was…worth spending their life on.
@Joshua Todd James: Crap, between you and Tom throwing bouquets around about it, I guess I’m going to have to finally read Captain’s Courageous!
No One of Consequence
If I may, I wanted to chime back in with one quote and a couple of memories.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull struck me only after the forced seventh re-reading from a persistent 7th grade teacher. Eventually, I got it. Only after the book had worked through my standoffishness of my teen years.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance also gave me pause. One of the only books I have ever put down, for fear of reading any further. If you know, you know.
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse also struck me dumb. When Siddhartha meets Gautama Buddha and tells him, “You can’t really teach me anything, can you?” and Buddha replies, “No.”
Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, where DEATH explains how man is where the Fallen Angel meets the Rising Ape…
But more recently, in the past couple of decades, in light of upbringing, family, country, and the myriad tapestry of lies we tell ourselves — I came across a passage in a book. Not central to the plot. Just an historical aside, a few lines from a carved in stone obelisk. This is from the most epic fantasy series I have yet encountered. (It’s not even close.) The quote below is from Steven Erickson’s Tales of the Malazan Empire. (Roughly 6 or 7 million words in the whole series, but what a vast, intricately interwoven tale of a world that has most every facet finely focused and polished from description to dialogue to metaphysics.
I encourage you to give this passage a few reads over. Maybe some of you will find the earth-shaking truth within it that I did:
Submitted with the hope of a connection somewhere for someone.
-NOoC
Heidi Mom
@cope: If you are interested in the World War 1 poets, you might like the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. It’s about soldiers being treated for shell shock in a Scottish psychiatric hospital, among them Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Heidi Mom
“In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to the lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the moon.” At Play in the Fields of the Lord–Peter Matthiesen.
Ms. Deranged in AZ
Any time I am creating art, of any kind, I am fully in the moment. And for my ADHD brain, this is so incredibly rare that it provides a sense of peace that I cannot find anywhere else. When I was younger I loved to rock climb and that also gave me that sense of timeless, pure joy. Unfortunately my body put a stop to that a long time ago. So creating art is my go to fix.
BellyCat
Wondrous post, Tom. Thank you.
BellyCat
Having now read the comments, most of them stirring, the state you’ve described strikes me as what is often described as “flow”, a wondrous plane in which time becomes entirely subservient to engagement. Creators of all stripe are essentially (fortunate) junkies enjoying this state. So, too, are appreciators of fine works in any realm or discipline.
But one must develop a nose for this indulgence and no two olfactory senses seem to be the same. (At age eighteen, mine was particularly allergic to Watership Down and challenging this some 42 years later is low on the bucket list!)
BigJimSlade
I haven’t had much time for fiction lately. Well, I haven’t made time for it… but I have put on Mahler’s Symphony #5 five times in the last 10 days, so that’s something (a different recording each time – trying to get to know the difference in interpretations).
Gloria DryGarden
@Heidi Mom: have you read The Snow Leopard by Peter Mathiesson? I used to dip into it anywhere in the book, for a few pages of trekking through Nepal, and a sense of peace and wonder.
I’m still bowled over by page one of The Color Purple by Alice Walker. It doesn’t bring joy, but it conveys a truth within half a page that brings me to my knees, that so much can be transmitted with so few sentences. Several of Ms Walker’s poems do that for me too.
Figure skating, hiking, backpacking and dance were my go tos. Now that those are physically not good options, I still get uplifted watching really fine choreography in skating, modern dance, and ballet. To really knock your socks off, I recommend Alvin Ailey Dance out of New York.
Then there’s Mozart, esp his symphony #40, and polyphonic choral music by Palestrina, and anything played on a lute. But also Lisa Gerrard with her emotive evocative singing in made up languages.
Ive never read Middlemarch,
I’ll have to look into it.
This week I’m being transported by the beauty of competitive figure skating costumes.
Asparagus Aspersions
On almost every page of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, I find somewhere to lose myself:
“Ah!’ said Lee. ‘I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.”
Nancy
The original post and the comments are moving, and I needed to read this today.
I’m grieving the loss of an adult child, not through death. My beloved offspring has decided that their upbringing was “f**ked up” and impossible to forgive, not due to abuse. They say we did not properly teach them adult skills and they had to figure it out for themselves. They’ve also decided that nothing I might do or say can change their decision.
I’ve been working on moving forward and allowing myself to feel the pain of this loss.
You’ve reminded me that beauty and joy can exist in the midst of sorrow.
Thank you, all.
Nancy
I will go back to the local art museum and spend time in front of the Monets.
RJ
Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. A strong man coming to terms with aging and weakening. The final 6 lines:
‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength that in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
cope
@Gloria DryGarden: I was just looking at my tattered paperback copy of “The Snow Leopard”. It went with me back and forth across the Atlantic a couple of times in my 20s and I also find it a compelling and inspiring read. Thanks for reminding me.
@Heidi Mom: Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look for it next time I am in the library.
arrieve
@No One of Consequence:
I have never heard of Steven Erickson–thank you for sharing. I love this:
Wonderful thread
Dmkingto
Two opening passages that have stuck with me for years. The first was from an author I had never heard of courtesy of the reissuing of the Time/Life “Time Reading Program” series in the 80s. (I highly recommend seeking these books out in used bookstores – almost every title I read in the series was excellent.)
Here are the opening paragraphs from Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, his memoir of his early childhood:
I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.
The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.
I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snow-clouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart.
For the first time in my life I was out of the sight of humans. For the first time in my life I was alone in a world whose behaviour I could neither predict nor fathom: a world of birds that squealed, of plants that stank, of insects that sprang about without warning. I was lost and I did not expect to be found again. I put back my head and howled, and the sun hit me smartly on the face, like a bully.
From this daylight nightmare I was awakened, as from many another, by the appearance of my sisters…
And the other from one of my favorite authors, John McPhee. This is from his book of essays Table of Contents. The opening paragraphs of the opening essay, Under The Snow:
When my third daughter was an infant, I could place her against my shoulder and she would stick there like velvet. Only her eyes jumped from place to place. In a breeze, her bright-red hair might stir, but she would not. Even then, there was profundity in her repose.
When my fourth daughter was an infant, I wondered if her veins were full of ants. Placing her against a shoulder was a risk both to her and to the shoulder. Impulsively, constantly, everything about her moved. Her head seemed about to revolve as it followed the bestirring world.
SteverinoCT
I revel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian, from which the movie Master and Commander springs (also the title of the first in the series). While having much action, and both broad and subtle humor, it is also such a master-class of fine writing. I have been surprised at times that classic literature, forced on us in school, turns out to actually be a Good Read.
I read stuff that may be a good story but not really great writing (I’ve been downing a few Louis L’Amour westerns as escapism, and I have come to think they are a bit of a drag).
PO’B never fails me, though: I started with the paperbacks, then completed buying all the hardcovers, and am now working on my Kindle collection to make it easier to get away. Online fans talk of a “circumnavigation” of the complete set of 20.5 volumes.
Geminid
@SteverinoCT: Louis L’Amour really churned them out, and there’s a certain sameness to his many of his Westerns. And he often resolves a good plot in the last ten pages, maybe in order to bring the book into the alloted 200 pages.
Some of L’Amour’s novels stand out to me though. A couple of those are Ride the River, for its heroine Echo Sackett and the material on 1830s Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Passin’ Though is another good one, with a resilient hero and quick-witted heroine, a misunderstood horse, and a trio of very villainous villains.
L’Amour’s early work is interesting. He wrote a series of adventure stories set in the Western Pacific centered starring “Pongo Jim,” a dare-devil hero with a seaplane who outwits Japanese agents while saving saving damsels in distress.
He also wrote some “hard-boiled” detective novels in the 1940s that were decent but not very exceptional. Then L’Amour found success with his Westerns and didn’t look back.
Later in his career L’Amour stepped out some and wrote The Walking Drum, a historical novel set in 14th century Near Asia, and The Haunted Mesa, a science-fictiony work set in contemporary southeast Utah. I enjoyed both of those.