I woke up feeling hopeless this morning, not for any particular reason. I’d slept well. The state of the world at 7:00 AM was not measurably different than it had been eight hours earlier. And yet sitting at this coffee shop, sipping my tea, I feel a vague, tender sorrow that reminds me something unknown to science or easy narratives curls within this bundle of synapses I call myself. Something wild and unpredictable unfurls this gray, sourceless sadness across my morning.
Maybe it’s the chill in the air. Maybe the sugary bowl of cereal I ate before bed. Maybe some dream I can’t remember. Whatever the cause, I sit, probing this feeling with tender fingers, the same way I might poke gently at the skin around a cut to see how deep it goes, to see if the bleeding has stopped or slowed.
Out the window, the sky is a crisp blue, set off by the bare branches of the hackberry tree and the bright façade of a white plaster house caught warm by winter’s oblique light. I’ve been struggling to make meaning from the pieces of my life—a near daily crisis for a secular millennial trudging wearily into her forth decade. All the prescribed parts are in place: job, children, marriage, house, all obtained with a little flair for rebellion, an awareness of how the world’s narratives can wheat paste over the innate proclivities and currents of our souls—if I believed in souls, which I’m not sure I do.
I spend so much time with words these days. Journaling hundreds of pages no one will ever read, improvising poems that will never be sung. If I’m lucky I’ll publish an essay or two each year, twenty pages for the stacks of notebooks I fill. And for what? Is the intrinsic pleasure of doing this day in day out enough to justify such vast expenditures of time? Or is all of life just passing the time (as Zadie Smith said)? Am I just whiling away the hours til I have none left? Is that my only option?
If I’m boring you, just know I bore myself with these questions too. Part of me says, “Get over it, girl. All meaning is made up. If you choose to forfeit allegiances to God and country, this is your lot. Succumb to the selfish hedonism of immediate desire. That’s all that remains for you.” So much of the world believes this. Many, many people I know have walked down that path. Many more wander its shadowed passages unaware.
But part of me fights back, shouts that such nihilism is just laziness posing as coy intelligence. That part shouts, “Struggle on brave soul! These questions are exactly what you were made for.” I lift my sword again against despair, even if this morning my arms are heavy, my mind filled with the gray lead of doubt.
About an hour ago, a former professor of mine posted this quote by Rebecca Solnit:
“The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”
The quote comes from her essay “How to Be a Writer” published by Lithub back in 2016. The piece is beautiful, full of the incisive, acerbic, generous ideas Solnit is known for. “Write,” she says, “Write a lot . . . Write bad stuff because the road to good writing is made out of words and not all of them are well-arranged words.” I read the essay and feel myself shed a little weight. Because of course what she says is true, but it isn’t hearing it that undoes the knots tied tight inside me. It’s hearing someone else say it, someone not me.
We are social beings and desire, perhaps above all else, to be seen and understood by others. This is hard for any artist, because so often we strike out beyond culture’s easy narratives, beyond the proffered meanings of God, country, profit, politics. We risk becoming islands in the surrounding culture, a state which John Donne says no man can survive. We might make our own meanings, as Solnit suggests, but we risk being isolated by them, intelligible only to ourselves. For me, this is where the trouble starts. These hundreds of pages I’ve written are real to no one else, only to me, alone on my island.
So publish! The world says. Publish a lot! Publish everything. Then those pages will be read and understood. Then all that wasted time will be redeemed! Even Solnit’s delineation of writer as “producer” (“producer of meanings”) points in this direction. When I write in my journal, I’ve created new meanings. But when I publish them, I have successfully “produced” those meanings, birthed them into the public space of the market. It’s not surprising then, that sometimes I confuse external success for being understood. I confuse bylines and book deals with communion. It’s not surprising, but it’s poison. As Solnit writes, pursuing the validation of others kills art. So what am I to do?
All this reminds me of a story. After the crucifixion of Jesus, a couple of his apostles left Jerusalem on foot, heading to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). They walked together speaking of their savior’s death, speaking—I assume—of their own despair, of all that they had lost. As they went, another traveller came and walked beside them. They told him of the brutality they’d witnessed at Calvary, the pain, the hardship. But the stranger rebuked them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken!” Shocked, confused, they invited this odd traveler to join them for dinner, and not until he broke and blessed the bread did they recognize the man they’d seen on the cross. Only then did they recognize what they had known all along: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?”
They had already been told that Jesus would rise, but in their grief they could not believe it. They already sensed that he was not simply another traveler, but despair kept them from trusting their intuition.
This morning Rebecca Solnit joined me on the road. Her rebuke brought me back to what I, in my grief and doubt, couldn’t remember. “But you already knew that,” she chided, “and everything else you need to know somewhere underneath the noise and the bustle and the anxiety and the outside instructions, including these ones.” I already knew that writing, the pin that has forever wound the clock of my heart, is the path I should take. But sometimes I forget. Sometimes I need to walk a country road, mournful, with friends, until a guide comes and scolds me back to what I already knew. Sometimes I have to make my own pilgrimage to Emmaus.
I’ll close for now, and text a fellow traveler to see if he too craves a little coffee and conversation. I’ll invite him to read some of my messy drafts, the ones that will never make it past the threshing floor. I’ll offer to do the same for him. We’ll find communion without the contracts and the royalties. We’ll come to an understanding outside the market. We’ll return again to the page.
This did not disappoint 👏