Writerly

Unicorn Writing

"Literature exists to help people know themselves."
~ Steve Almond ~
[See also ~ Magical Thinking
and "To Assume My Humanity"]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
~ Simone de Beauvoir ~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Did I offer peace today?
Did I bring a smile to someone's face?
Did I say words of healing?
Did I let go of my anger and resentment?
Did I forgive? Did I love?
These are the real questions.
~ Henri Nouwen ~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On a quest for self - knowledge? Do some reading; do some writing! The best approach I know to the "real questions"? Grab some books and some notebooks! The various writers and characters in the following selections question the impact of all kinds of literature on their understanding of peace, joy, healing, anger, resentment, forgiveness, and love:

Two - Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
by Madeleine L'Engle
"And how could I call myself a writer? . . . Perhaps I am a real writer as long as I go on writing, as long as I go on trying, which I shall always do" (158, 137).

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
by Gabrielle Zevin
"He is not a writer, but he has thoughts about the profession, and he wants to tell her [his daughter Maya] those things" (246).

Homer and Langley
by E. L. Doctorow
". . . Langley used to bring back from the secondhand bookshops slim volumes of poetry and read from them as if they were news. Poems have ideas, he said. The ideas of poems come out of their emotions and their emotions are carried on images. That makes poems far more interesting than your novels, Homer. Which are only stories" (15).

Case Histories
by Kate Atkinson
"She should have studied science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on" (42).
[See also Annie Barrow ~ The Truth . . . ]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One more directive that I would add to Nouwen's list:

Did I contemplate my mortality today?
I remain perpetually perplexed by the inadequacy with which I see my elders approaching their end - of - life, even though they've had a lifetime of eight decades or more leading up to it. One of the best ways to prepare, it seems to me, is read a book or two, watch some movies. The concept does not require excessive sophistication: you could start with Little Women, Old Yeller, Jesus Christ Superstar. So many characters dying all the time, right?

Reading -- and contemplating what you have read-- will greatly enchance your comprehension of mortality, both your own and that of others. Hemingway and Huxley, each in their own way, point this out:

Death in the Afternoon
by Ernest Hemingway
". . . all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and . . . no true-story teller . . . would keep that from you" (from Chapter 9).

Foreword to the Second Edition of
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
"And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle -- the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: 'How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of our Final End?' "

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A few additional thoughts on risk & loss & love:

Two - Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
by Madeleine L'Engle
"If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure. Marriage is a terrible risk. So is having children. So is giving a performance in the theatre, or the writing of a book. Whenever something is completed successfully, then we must move on, and that is again to risk failure" (173).

"Does a marriage end with the death of one of the partners? In a way, yes. I made my promises to Hugh 'till death do us part,' and that has happened. But the marriage contract is not the love that builds up over many years, and which never ends . . . despite our faults and flaws and failures, what we gave each other was good. I am who I am because of our years together, freed by his acceptance and love for me" (230).

The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
by Gabrielle Zevin
"In Amelia's experience, most people's problems would be solved if they would only give more things a chance" (12).

"Friedman [a fictitious author] gets at something specific about what it is to lose someone. How it isn't one thing. he writes about how you lose and lose and lose" (99).

"'Maya, we are what we love. We are that we love. . . . We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read.
We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on," (251).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

P.S.
For more on the Readerly / Writerly Life
see my current posts

From the Desk of Ernest Hemingway:
"But never feel as good as while writing."

&

From the Desk of Simone de Beauvoir:
On the Side of Happiness

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

&

From the Desk Of

@ Kitti's Book List

Stars, Moons, Phosphorescence

Falling asleep and waking up to the intense light of this month's full moon made me think of my sister Diane's pre - Christmas epiphany. Back in mid - December, she wrote:

"Early this morning I took our garbage to the curb. Our subdivision is very dark, as we have no street lights and the lots are big. Other neighbors are hard to see. It was raining a little, and I almost changed my mind about going in the dark. But when I opened the front door to look out, I saw a big bright star. It was only a decoration on my neighbor's house, but it shone down on my driveway just enough so I could tell where to walk. Taking that walk so reminded me of that long ago walk taken by Kings to see our Savior. God bless your day."

Reading her description of the bright Christmas star, even if it was "only a decoration," brought to mind my favorite quote from the movie Apollo 13, when the television reporter asks Jim Lovell (as portrayed by Tom Hanks) if there is "a specific instance in an airplane emergency when you can recall fear?"

Both Lovell's revelation and my sister's epiphany give me goosebumps. Reading their words, I feel exhilarated and humbled at the same time.

Lovell:"Uh well, I'll tell ya, I remember this one time - I'm in a Banshee at night in combat conditions, so there's no running lights on the carrier. It was the Shrangri-La, and we were in the Sea of Japan and my radar had jammed, and my homing signal was gone... because somebody in Japan was actually using the same frequency. And so it was - it was leading me away from where I was supposed to be. And I'm lookin' down at a big, black ocean, so I flip on my map light, and then suddenly: zap. Everything shorts out right there in my cockpit. All my instruments are gone. My lights are gone. And I can't even tell now what my altitude is. I know I'm running out of fuel, so I'm thinking about ditching in the ocean. And I, I look down there, and then in the darkness there's this uh, there's this green trail. It's like a long carpet that's just laid out right beneath me. And it was the algae, right? It was that phosphorescent stuff that gets churned up in the wake of a big ship. And it was - it was - it was leading me home. You know? If my cockpit lights hadn't shorted out, there's no way I'd ever been able to see that. So uh, you, uh, never know . . . what . . . what events are to transpire to get you home" (ellipses in original text).


Awhile back (see "How to Keep On Hoping"), I mentioned a favorite passage from E. L. Doctorow, quoted by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird, describing a similar phenomenon: " 'writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you are going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you" (18).

That's what stars are for . . . and moons . . . and headlights . . . and phosphorescence . . .

P.S. A friend writes:
Tonight, the first full moon
after the winter solstice.
The "Wolf Moon" or the "Old Moon."
A beautiful full moon over Lee's Summit
as we roasted marshmallows.