Who doesn’t need a well-furnished room for reflection?
A friend visited a monastery where he wasn’t allowed to talk for two days. He’s a writer—a teacher and raconteur too—and he was nervous about the silence. Turns out he loved it. The days were full of wonder and meaning, and he returned a convert, an acolyte of stillness, a true believer. He says, “Often we think language helps reveal the world to us. But my experience during the silent weekend retreat proved quite the opposite. Often our language conceals the world from us.”
In Tobias Wolff’s novel Old School, a gifted writer disavows her skill. When encouraged to keep writing she gives a withering reply: “Mmm, don’t think so. Too frivolous. Know what I mean? It just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn’t really do any good.”
Indictments of writing like these that see it as a vain thing, something that obscures as much as it illuminates, are not easily shaken. As someone who writes and teaches others to write (“Bear witness to the world,” I tell my students) I often puzzle over the desire to craft language: the sheer labor of it, the strange pleasure too. “And generally let every student of nature take this as a rule: that whatever his mind seizes and dwells upon with peculiar satisfaction is to be held in suspicion,” warns Francis Bacon.
For me, much of writing is about the madness of having to say, of needing to hold a metaphor up to the world, and I think, I’d do it no matter what. But considering less compulsive reasons, I would say, maybe, that, amid a lifetime of books, it’s about trying to give back what I’ve gotten, crafting keys to unlock something for a reader—a memory, a perspective.
Better still: I want to offer the reader a room for reflection, oddly furnished but comfortable.
Thinking about this writerly impulse, I recall a forgotten memory: writing to a friend’s mom after he died when we were just teenagers. I wasn’t sure if his mom even read the letter. Years later she stopped my dad in the grocery store to say she’d kept it, still had it. I remember how my dad looked at me, remember thinking that all I did was tell the truth about what my friend was like, really like, how he loved indiscriminately and how much he was loved. I saw then what words could do.
Maybe there’s something about that letter that lies beneath my desire to write. At least I hope it does, and even though it might be naïve, I go for broke and say This is the truth of the thing, and while it may have been fleeting, it mattered, matters still—thinking maybe, just maybe, like that letter written years ago, I can make something better than myself, fashioned from just the right words, grateful for the audience it finds.
Robert Erle Barham is Associate Professor of English at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, GA. He is the deputy editor of Current.
Image: Henry Adams seated at desk in study wearing light coat (Wikimedia Commons)