| One Writer's Life, Primer for the Rest of Us |
July 31, 2009
Annie Dillard is an intense writer, and a generous one: she writes as she counsels others to write in her book The Writing Life, "spend it all, shoot it play it lose it, right away every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a late place in the book, or for another book; give it all, give it now." In every essay collected in The Writing Life, she gives with her hands thrust forward and wide open: it is with blazing but focused ardor that she shares her acute observations and ideas in words, sentences, and paragraphs that are crafted and perfected, never sloppy but never restrained. Sometimes she goes over the top ("I was scarcely alive" -- after a day of intense writing) and ("I wept on the shore in fear" when she sees big, green-tinged waves) but her exacting requirements -- that she capture the essence and truth of what she wants to convey -- excuse, even justify, the hyperbolic state she reaches in her writing.
The Writing Life is not a book to encourage writers. The faint of heart will back away from the writing life as she describes it, one of self-sacrifice and self-absorption and with little underlying importance ("Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?" ) or return ("many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.") And yet the impulse of writing she understands and underscores and holds holy: "There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment."
What Dillard abhors is writing for the popular appeal (the dumbing down of writing): she makes a wonderful argument that "the people who read are the people like literature" and "the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep --the more likely people are to read it." She is talking, of course, about true readers, those who "are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books." ( I love this line but one look at the best seller list shows there is a lot of money in writing the books that draw the TV crowd -- and Dillard would respond that the profit motive is the lowest incentive, and least likely to bear fruit, of the writing life). She concludes by stating, "I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place." Dillard holds no punches and delivers the truth straight up like she sees it, with words that are crafted, perfected, and crystal clear.
When she describes the internal engine of writing, she captured, for me, the essence of how it feels to write: "The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick valves; it palpates the dark muscles as horses, feeling for something, it knows not what." What is hoped for -- what I strive for -- is that the writing that comes out of such sensations can then be honed and polished, to deliver, in the end, truth and beauty. We all feel deeply but only great writers can "isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and our hearts"; only they can "magnify and dramatize our days,...illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness,....press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel their majesty and power...."
Much of what Dillard shares in The Writing Life applies to any life that requires engagement, whether it be one of mothering, lawyering, teaching, building, temping, or trucking, and it applies to loving anyone who is in that life with you. In life and in love, be fully engaged, be exacting of yourself but also free and open to sharing: "the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you."
In her final essay, an homage to a stunt pilot and an exploration of what it is that drives us to create beauty and explore limits, Dillard offers a quotation from the French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, "Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe" to underline her point of going farther, deeper, and closer, to understand life. For me, the point of Chardin's words, and of writing, and of life itself, is to make connections with people and ideas, and that even when one can reach understanding or happiness or relief or joy on his/her own in "separation", it is only through communicating that understanding that we can we find "deeper penetration" (connection again) with the universe of humanity. It is through the connections we make that we create lives that are satisfying but not static, fulfilling but not complacent. As Dillard makes so clear in The Writing Life, life is about giving and receiving, both in abundance.
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