Books

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:

————————————————-

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.

Respite: Writing That Makes You Go “Damn….”Post + Comments (43)