Reading and writing

For years now, I’ve considered reading to be an aspect of writing, as connected to my ability to write as inhaling is related to exhaling. Just as I cannot breathe out before I breathe in, I cannot write unless there is some reading to back it up. This is true even though I believe in my own self-sufficiency. I could not have become effective as a writer if I had not read voraciously.

Though writing has always been my greatest pleasure, I have occasionally been able to gain as much pleasure from reading as from creating my own texts. I knew that feeling as long ago as the age of ten or eleven, when I first skimmed Thoreau’s Walden in my father’s library. I began to recognize the magic in the words as far more than just a recognition of new ideas and descriptions. It was replaced by the conviction that I was reaching across the years and the miles to touch another human being who was had been waiting to talk to me.

That feeling has never left me. Ever since, I have viewed reading and writing as a dialogue. I have filled the margins of books with comments I wished I could have addressed to the writer – a running commentary from the sometimes ignorant, sometimes merely uninitiated me, an effort to relate words on the page to my own inchoate experiences and feelings and opinions.

From the time I was very young, everybody who knew me also knew that I thought of myself as a writer. Yet, at first, I did not have a strong sense of what that implied. Only later did I run across the well-known but overly simplistic definition of a writer as somebody who writes – presumably in contrast to everybody else, who does not.

The problem with that definition is that it leaves reading out of the equation. Very early in the game, a niece asked me what it would take to become a writer. I told her to surround herself with models, to read the best writing she could, so that she could learn the difference instinctively. Once she had read widely, I said, she would know what writing was all about.

I myself was getting more ambiguous advice. After an undergraduate essay of mine was published in a university newsletter, I took it to the head of the creative writing program and asked him how I might become an even better writer. He gave my essay a quick look – too quick, I thought, to give it a fair reading – then, in a tone I have come to identify with shills and con-men, he said “This essay is a good reason why you should become an English major.” But if there was a reason, it remained a mystery to me. He didn’t say that my essay showed promise or that it was too vague or that I was so far from having talent that I could only come to understand the nature of real writing if I studied in his program. In any case, he offered no apparent encouragement, and I focused on philosophy.

But I discovered that written words could do far more than nudge me into a quiet conversation with dead authors when I was blindsided by the stories of DH Lawrence for the first time. I was overwhelmed by their unique explosive power – amazed that literary works could move me even before I had thought about them. They motivated me to move away from the study of philosophy and persuaded me to explore what it was about words on a page that could instantly fire up my insides and change me forever.

Another aesthetic thrill awaited me as a graduate student in the novels of William Faulkner. Coming to them without any appreciation for the importance of structure in literature, I was struck by the architectonics of literature – years before I knew the word.

For writers there is also a flipside to reading because an encounter with great talent can be as discouraging as it is stimulating. The last time I returned to the stories of Flannery O’Connor, I was so impressed by the style, the plots, the characters – in short, by everything that makes them memorable – that I stopped writing for months, deterred by the impossibility of matching anything I had read.

This illustrates the potential danger that lurks in great literature for writers who are serious about their craft. Reading poses a risk for the ego of a writer and threatens the fragile sense of value that must be maintained by anybody who sends a message out into the world. What keeps me going is the realization that the words I have shaped appear as never before in the history of the world, and that whoever reads my messages has never seen them expressed in the same way before.

Besides, as anybody who loves reading will appreciate, I simply love writing.

Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent

When I rejoined my friends at the table the other night, I was blindsided by the question, “So what do you think about God?” It is a question that many people find important but which I have always been reluctant to speculate about because there is no way to determine whether I am ever closer to the truth or farther from it – or whether the question makes any sense at all.

It is a fundamental belief of mine that what I think, how I speculate about the nature of the cosmos, makes no difference to reality. This is partly as a result of spending much of my life in the presence of people who think their opinion makes all the difference in the world because it affects everything they do.

Some people could not believe we would uproot our life and move west because that is simply not done by people our age. We understand whey many people let their opinions calcify until their way of life is fixed. But one aspect of growing older that has never appealed to us is the way so many seem to change only in the direction of becoming caricatures of what they were when they were younger.

When somebody goes beyond the hundredth birthday, reporters gather around to learn the secret. It often turns out to be drinking an ounce of corn mash every day or avoiding men who yell. If I am ever asked the question (even before I turn one hundred), I would say that I stay young by keeping a childlike curiosity about the world, by refusing to accept any answer as the final answer, and, as Emily Dickinson put it, by dwelling in possibility.

I was raised to believe that truth was there for the plucking, that our major duty as human beings is to find repose by accepting the ancient traditions – that is, to find God by following the path laid out by our ancestors. But as I got older and explored more traditions than the one I had first learned, I realized that the same lesson would have been drummed into me if I had been born to a Hindu family in India, or if my parents had been Confucians.

I used to believe in Truth, with a capital T, and I spent years hoping it would become clear to me. What I discovered was that truth has a small t.

The quotation at the top of this essay, by André Gide, is one of my favorites. I am actually fearful of settling on a truth that would keep me from expanding, growing, discovering. It would alter the basic me beyond recognition. It would send me back to square one, where I began, when my parents and teachers could define the world and my duties with unshakable certainty.

Experience has taught me not to be afraid of the ambiguity and mystery of existence. I believe it is more fruitful to explore the world than to settle on a single way of looking at it. I am heartened that nobody ever lived my life before I got here and that nobody has come up with a coherent theory of reality that I can continue to accept without question.

So what do I think of God? I do not worry about whether God exists. I just try to live a life that will allow God, if there is such a thing, to believe in me.

But this is not the final answer, of course. If I ever stumbled on a final answer, I would doubt it.

Individual freedom and the need for connection

There is something exhilarating about moving to a city where nobody knows you. The anonymity can be intoxicating. People look through you without expectations beyond the simple social demands not to be stepped on or cheated. I realized this for the first time almost forty years ago, when I took a job in a major American city and observed the faces as I walked around the busy downtown at lunchtime. Some people were noticeably fearful and others were threatening, but most faces were blank, hiding unknown thoughts, revisiting the past or anticipating the future. But none of them were focused on me. I was not a part of their experience, even when I jostled against them in the subway. I was truly alone, perhaps for the first time in my life. And I felt more inner comfort in isolation than I had ever known before.

As a writer, I am never alone. I may work in a room by myself, but my words always go out to an audience, and when there is none in sight I fabricate one, even if it is just another side of myself. I project active thoughts over to my listening self as if to somebody else, as if the writer and the editor in me were separate people. And at bottom I am always writing for a listener. I have read out loud to my absent mother for many years, and continued to use her as a sounding board even after she died. My younger brother was the imagined listener whenever I thought about organized sports, and when he died my interest in sports dried up as well. My older brother was the target for every unconventional thought I had. I would call him to share odd facts, or to look at a web site I had found that seemed to make music visible. My thoughts about religion would not have advanced as they did if I had not been corresponding with a friend in Israel. Now, without him, they are moribund.

In theory, I understand the need for community, I understand why people want to constantly relate to others. At the odd periods of my life when I have been employed, I have found meeting people to be the most pleasant part of the job -- far better than being paid. Today, in a new city, I am working as a volunteer at the food bank. The job keeps me in touch with men and women with various handicaps, physical or social. Most have been injured by their collision with the vicissitudes of life. I have met men just released from jail, women who have smoked and sat in the sun so much they have shriveled their skin far more than nature would have done in their thirty years.

Something in me simply wants the connection, wants to nourish the hope that somebody somewhere on the road will be worth knowing as a friend. Reinforcing that, I harbor a perversely moral side that wants to help the world even if I cannot cure it. But that is in theory only. In practice, I have never known anybody who was more self-contained than I am. My years in isolation were the most significant and rewarding I have ever known. I am my own best friend.

Changing life when people think it's too late

There are only a few significant ways my wife and I can change our lives. I am in my late seventies and she is surviving her sixties. But we believe there is nothing to stop us from trying. So late last year we sold everything in Ottawa and moved west to a place where we knew nobody.

Our most ambitious goal was to get out of the house. I mean to live in a way that would take us out every day. We used to have a picturesque three-bedroom apartment on the twenty-sixth floor of a building, with a clear westward view miles up the Ottawa River. It was impressive to everybody who visited, but we spent lots of time there and I often heard the complaint that we should be out meeting people and doing new things. We came to the Okanagan to break our sedentary habits and become more active.

We brought work west with us, a promise to finish a commissioned play for which we have already received part payment. I sank hours of time researching the material in Ottawa, and she, the playwright, has been making slow headway on the script.

The years since I last posted anything on this site have been years of soul-searching for me, years of wondering what to do with the verbal talents I have been sending out into the void for most of my life. I have always wanted to be a writer, and I have used that ambition to learn a lot about the world (notably about myself) but relatively few people ever benefited from the things I have learned. While that was maddeningly frustrating at first, it eventually gave way to resignation when I decided that I myself was a good enough audience. I even stopped writing letters.

That's certainly a change -- not one I would have preferred, but one that has taken me down different paths than I ever would have devised on my own.

Further details, as I am fond of saying, at eleven.