Dedication

This book dedication, from Claire M. Strom’s book Profiting from the Plains, encapsulates research and motherhood:

This book is dedicated to my daughter,
Phoebe Helga Margaret Strom
She was not yet born when I started my research and will be eleven by the time it is published. She has, therefore, through no fault or choice of her own, lived with James J. Hill and the Great Northern Railway all her life. I thank her for that, and for the joy and grace she has brought to my life.

James J. Hill was a decent man, and he kept a diary. His biographer Martin Albro writes:

Like many another diarist, James J. Hill began the new year with the best of intentions, but quickly found that it was an onerous task to live a full, energetic, exciting life and note it all down in a book as well.

Here’s to exciting days!

A podcast episode I liked

A few weeks ago now, the Ezra Klein Show interviewed Marilynne Robinson for the release of her latest book. I want to hold on to three things she said, one about beauty:

I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered.

And the idea of a “mind schooled to good attention”:

When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.

But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.

We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well.

And her thoughts on God as she’s studied his portrayal in the book of Genesis:

[About the Ten Commandments] The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.

[About the ways in which the ‘chosen people’ in Genesis fail] In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.

I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are, in their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.

And then Robinson, in the interview, goes on to talk about how forgiveness is demonstrated in Genesis, with the story of Joseph, and how it contrasts to previous literature, like The Odyssey, in which the hero comes home and kills the strangers who’ve taken over his house. I love her concluding remarks on this:

It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.

I find Robinson’s voice and thoughts very calming to listen to. The episode can be found here.

Biographies

While I'm writing my thesis, I like checking people's names, to see if they have interesting biographies. 

Consider Adrien-Gabriel Morice. He wrote three volumes on church history in the West in which Aubigny's name is linked with vicomte Jacques d'Aubigny. But he was an insufferable man. He joined the Oblates but could not obey superiors. He was sent to a mission where there was one other priest, a Fr. Georges Blanchet. And this is what happened:

he made life so difficult for Blanchet, a gentle man much loved by the Carrier, that later that year the priest begged to be transferred before Morice’s perpetual disagreements drove him mad. That year Blanchet ceded supervision of the mission to Morice to avoid further conflict, but he would remain there, building churches and doing housework, until his retirement ten years later. A succession of priests, finding Morice impossible to work and live with, and refusing to become his servant, chose to leave.

What a character!

On another day, I checked this railroad contractor's name to discover that his daughter was more renowned than he was... Charlotte Whitehead Ross was the first female doctor in Montreal, having taken her medical education at Woman’s Medical College at Philadelphia in 1870, while also bearing children. She came to Manitoba in 1881 where she continued to practice medicine. Her biographer, Vera K. Fast, writes: 

After assisting at a birth she would often scrub the cabin floor and do the washing, the cooking, and the baking to help the mother and family. Her daughters looked after the Ross home in her absence, although she always did the baking, which she enjoyed, as she did embroidery, knitting, and music, especially the piano. 

She was never licenced in Manitoba, and a bill to authorize her to practice in 1888 was withdrawn. I like how Fast writes:  

Undeterred, Charlotte continued on her busy rounds by horse, sleigh, canoe, and train, not defiantly, for she was no social or political activist, but simply because there was a need.

Biographies are inspiring!

Happy Friday!

Listening

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and this is my favourite part… a fictional broadcast excerpt:

(And then he enthuses about coal.) "Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it children. That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fir or a reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe ten million or maybe one hundred million. Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light it could and transformed the sun's energy into itself, into bark, twigs, stems, because plants eat light in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years, eons in which something like a month or a decade or even your whole life was just a puff of air, a snap of two fingers. And eventually the peat dried and became like a stone and someone dug it up, and the coal man brought it to your house and maybe you yourself carried it to the stove, and now that sunlight, sunlight one hundred million years old is heating your home tonight. [...] Open your eyes (concludes the man) and see what you can with them, before they close forever."

Eating

I’ve enjoyed making each one of the menus I’ve tried from Amy Theilen’s book Company. So far, they’ve been three: one Christmas-themed, with turkey, one called “More Time Than Money” kind of meal, with chicken, and one for Easter, featuring ham.

I like how when I pick a menu from this book, I’m surrendering my menu-planning decisions and letting her be the expert. I learn so much and the meal’s success turns out to be such a reward.

To use the leftover ham this week, I made this Ham and Tomato Penne, which sounds fancier in its original Italian: Penne al Baffo.

Reluctantly, I must sign off and get back to the real work… I leave you my dog as snack supplicant:

Like buying a house

Since hearing this podcast episode several weeks ago, Derek Thompson’s comparison has stuck in my mind as an encapsulation of how I feel writing this thesis. Here’s the quote, lightly edited:

One thing I learned writing my first book [...] is that writing changes so much as the length of the work changes; that in a way, blogging is pure writing and by the time you get to a book, writing a book is actually not entirely writing, it's almost more organizing, than it is writing. One way that I thought of it is like if you're writing an article, it's almost like shopping for one shirt. I'm just looking for one data set about Americans hanging out less. And once I find that data set, I've found my shirt, I can write the article. Writing a column sometimes, like a 3000 word column, is more like buying furniture for a room. It's a lot of buying stuff and when you buy it, you have to lay it out and once you've laid it out, you're like ok, now the room is together. Writing a book is like buying a new house and outfitting it with furniture. I mean, yes, it is about buying stuff, but the biggest job for a new house is figuring out where all the damn stuff goes. And that's the major challenge with a book, so that's how I think about it at a conceptual level.

A word on the word community

I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes a single word will plunk itself down amid the furniture in my brain, and just like any new thing, it’ll grab my attention and I’ll notice it each time I walk by. For the last little while, it’s been the word “community”. Did it start with Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart? Maybe… See, she talks about belonging:

Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He [John Cacioppo] explains, "To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favour their outcome." Of course we're a social species. That's why connection matters. It's why shame is so painful and debilitating. It's why we're wired for belonging. (p. 179)

Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History just finished a season with a series of episodes on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the final episode (The Mennonite National Anthem) makes a poignant point about a person’s sense of community and how it can be disrupted by the denial of a basic need:

[About Lester Glick:] "He is just one of the kindest most gracious people but as he writes about his experience, he writes about getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread, you know, he's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough." Back when Lester Glick was working at the state mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak. He loved to work with patients and help them. But now in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, anti-social. He started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs.  "And so there is this separation that starts to take place, this breakdown in relations that is not at all in keeping with the real Lester Glick, but was the new malnourished Lester Glick who was separated from all the people around him." He understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit; it is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level. "Yeah. It's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood, that church community, the family community that shaped who he was in the most basic ways."

Having read that, does it seem like an obvious conclusion? Maybe. But the thing with a word that stands out, is that you start to notice it in different contexts. Oh look, you say (to yourself), there it is over there! It looks different in that place!

This is from the podcast Invisibilia, on an episode called Power Tools, where the guest, Peter Belmi, discusses a class he attended where the professor taught Machiavellian-type tactics for gaining power in the work place and how it conflicted with his upbringing:

"In a working-class environment, where there's lots of threats, lots of uncertainty, everybody has to coordinate because doing so helps us survive as a group. And so people learn in those contexts that what it means to be a good person is to be sensitive to the needs of other people, to see yourself as connected to others." This tracks with social science that shows that by contrast, people from wealthier backgrounds are taught to value focusing on themselves. "We don't need others as much in order to survive, and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you're unique compared to others.”

How nice, you might think, how charming… But wait! Here is the idea of community again, but this time, in the concrete functioning of society! It’s Roman Mars, (episode 508 here) explaining to former President Bill Clinton why not being able to pop the hood and fix your own car isn’t such a bad thing…

There's also a beauty in other people doing it better and you just kind of trusting in that. That is how we build a society. So the world […] has to be an ecosystem of things we know and control and there's individual agency and liberty and things like this and then you have to like, fall into the warm embrace of a designed world that people have thought of and their expertise is present and maybe you don't understand it and hopefully we're engaged enough in the civic society that you trust those things. And I think that that's super inspiring, like I love the things we create together, collectively.

And then, there’s this last quote, which isn’t exactly about community, really, but it’s this touching idea about the small human action it takes to foster this usually-grandiose ideal. It’s an action so small it can be overlooked and dismissed… it doesn’t win prizes, it’s not the kind of generosity journalists look to profile. And yet, its small size betrays the effort it took, and takes, and will take, to build and maintain this kind of goodness. It comes at the end of a piece by the Guardian, read on their podcast The Audio Long Read, titled “‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?”.

I have to accept my parents for who they are (...) my mom has been gone for awhile now, but I still speak to my dad. He's 90, has other wives and other children, so I need to take away my prejudices about that, forgive and just deal with him as he is. He's an old man, so I'm going to do what I can for him and I'm not going to have any malice about it because that means I haven't truly let go.

Isn’t that amazing? I can’t help but feel in awe of that person’s example. Mason Currey in his latest newsletter included a quote from Virgina Woolf which seems to capture the sentiment I feel reading this.

I’m thinking here of a favorite Virginia Woolf line, in which she praised the Irish novelist George Moore for “eking out a delicate gift laboriously.”

Quotes

I like writing advice and the latest book I’ve read on the subject is Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several Short Sentences About Writing. My favourite quote is this one:

You may need to write for yourself for awhile,
And listen only to the language.
That’s okay.
The first person who need to be persuaded of your authority
Is you. [p. 132]

Quotes on planning

I just finished reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. What he writes about planning reminds me of Ellen Hendrikson’s comments about the various forms social anxiety can take (in this post over here). What Oliver Burkeman writes about planning is a larger observation:

[…] we plan compulsively, because the alternative is to confront how little control over the future we really have. Moreover, most of us seek a specifically individualistic kind of mastery over time - our culture’s ideal is that you should control your schedule, doing whatever you prefer, whenever you want - because it’s scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing, from marriage and parenting to business or politics, depends on cooperating with others, and therefore on exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainties of relationships. [page 31]

Further on in the book he writes:

But planning is an essential tool for constructing a meaning full life, and for exercising our responsibilities toward other people. The real problem isn’t planning. It’s that we take our plans to be something they aren’t. What we forget, or can’t bear to confront, is that, in the words of the American meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein, “a plan is just a thought.” We treat our plans as though they are a lasso, thrown from the present around the future, in order to bring it under our command. But all a plan is - all it could ever possibly be - is a present-moment statement of intent. It’s an expression of your current thoughts about how you’d ideally like to deploy your modest influence over the future. The future, of course, is under no obligation to comply.

It’s easy to argue that this isn’t a new idea. The New Testament’s letter from St James reads:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. [Chap 4: 13-16]

When I tutor students, I send them links to a resource that can help with a recurring problem they have with their writing. I try to encourage them to look at the link by making it specific. I take it for granted that they might not have the inclination to read through much information, but I also hope that the nudge might lead them to finding it useful. You never know if maybe, the way the information is presented just makes sense, if you haven’t just helped them have their own lightbulb moment.

And so, people talking about planning… Look at this lovely variety and the different aspects they highlight! A quote from C.S. Lewis that Oliver Burkeman included in his December 9th newsletter, The Imperfectionist, blesses even interruptions:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own', or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Over-preparing

I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.

I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)

She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.

Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”

So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!

Reading and writing (forever!)

I must constantly trick myself into writing here, as if it were a high-wire act I was only performing for myself. I like getting to the end, having spent time fully concentrated in the act of balancing vague feelings and concrete words. I also like finding how other writers manage… top of list is Craig Mod’s recent interview for Every.to in which he says of his newsletters: “I think of them as my public sketchbooks.” Fantastic! Welcome now, to this here post, on this here blog, which happens to be, “my public sketchbook”!

Shall we discuss reading fiction? Lets! because recently, two books have mentioned it. There’s Claire Messud in Kant’s Little Prussian Heand and Other Reasons Why I Write (2020):

“We must struggle to change our institutions, but our resistance to the depravity and depletion of these times must go beyond that. It must also occur in our souls.” (p 108)

and

“Art has the power to alter our interior selves, and in so doing to inspire, exhilarate, provoke, connect, and rouse us. As we are changed, our souls are awakened to possibility - immeasurable, yes, and potentially infinite. If ever there was a time for art, it’s now.” (p 109)

And there’s George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in The Rain (2021):

“There’s a certain way of talking about stories that treats them as a kind of salvation, the answer to every problem; they are ‘what we live by,’ and so on. And, to an extent, as you can see by this book, I agree. But I also believe, especially as I get older, that we should keep our expectations humble. We shouldn’t overestimate or unduly glorify what fiction does. And actually, we should be wary of insisting that it do anything in particular.
(…)
“So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
”Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know - it really does it. That change is finite but real.
”And that’s not nothing.
”It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.” (p 382-3)

Then, to this end, Saunders makes a little list of fiction-reading benefits:

“I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.
”I feel an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.
”I feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.
”My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.
”I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that reenergization of my language).
”I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won’t be.
”I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.
”So that’s all pretty good.” (p 387-8)

Ah… Saunders… this description is delectable. I’m sorry… my appreciation for this book borders on fandom, but I can’t help it. It’s like ordering a meal at a restaurant and being so perfectly satisfied, you’d kiss your fingers, because the chef was married and because this is an acceptable form of flattery in Europe, even if you’re Canadian.

But food is also fortifying. So let’s end on writing advice. There is plenty in Saunders’ book, but this one is at the end. Saunders quotes Robert Frost, who, after listening to a long and complicated question about writing, answered “Young man, don’t worry: WORK!”

Saunders writes: “I love this advice. It’s exactly true to my experience. We can decide only so much. The big questions have to be answered by hours at the desk. So much of the worrying we do is a way of avoiding work, which only delays the (work-enabled) solution.
”So, don’t worry, work, and have faith that all answers will be found there.” (p 387)

"What are you reading?"

Last time I talked to my mom she asked, “what are you reading?” twice during our conversation. Here’s the complete list, now, as I sit at my desk, having ridden my bike as dark came over Winnipeg…

I just finished Motherland by Elissa Altman. This evening I’ve been scrolling through the author’s Instagram, combing it for evidence of I don’t know what… love? survival?

I’m just about done A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, having cast aside (temporarily) Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution.

I picked up Wow No Thank You because I’d like to be funnier, but I’m not sure it’s working because serious books are taking over my desk, my time… Things like Homeland to Hinterland; The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century or The Genealogy of the First Metis or Canada Post Offices 1755-1895, I mean, take your pick, they’re all very serious.

Motherland has this quote by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Lathe of Heaven: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

A final word on conspiracy theories

I really like this quote… it is lifted from the conclusion of a podcast mini-series by Patrick Radden Keefe titled “Wind of Change”. I wrote it down a year ago and came across it while looking for something else. I wrote it down before I could have guessed how many new conspiracy theories I would hear. It expresses why I feel so impatient with them.

That’s the nature of a conspiracy theory, it’s impossible to prove, but also impossible to disprove, so if you have the temperament and the time you can devote yourself to solving it for the rest of your life. But if you’re a person whose livelihood depends on the slow and steady accretion of provable facts then there’s a madness in chasing a story like this. And there’s something about the moment we’re living in when everyday the nature of truth is called into question that make me feel like the stakes of solving this slightly ridiculous story are greater somehow than the story itself. (…) The rabbit hole is beautiful but it is deep.

Two moments

This morning when I walked the dog, the river was like glass.

On the Ten Percent Happier podcast, I savoured what Christiane Wolfe had to say about anger and intention:

Forgiveness is a really hard one [emotion]. And forgiveness doesn’t happen overnight. Forgiveness is not something that we decide, just like “yeah that makes sense to forgive that person, or that situation, or myself.” But the thing is that anger will turn into bitterness, if we, over time, can’t let go of it. And that’s just like a yucky feeling. (…) We have agency over our intention. We don’t have agency, as I said, we can’t decide to forgive or we can’t decide to be compassionate or we can’t decide to love, right? But what we do, is we can set the intention and then we can keep inviting these qualities in, over and over and over and just trust basic neuroscience, right, that whatever we do repeatedly, that will change us.

Reading

I just finished listening to the audio version of How to Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I transcribed a few quotes where I felt I was learning something new:

The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As president Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “you do not take a person who, for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say ‘you are free to compete with all the others’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978: “in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race. There is no other way. In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.” (…) The construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans towards equity is reverse discrimination. (Chap. 1)

We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an anti-racist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism and regular self-examination. Racist ideas have defined our societies since its beginning and can feel so natural and obvious as to be banal. But antiracist ideas remain difficult to comprehend in part because they go against the flow of this country’s history. (Chap. 1)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces, policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Chap. 2)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 3)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 6)

Some white people do not identify as white for the same reason they identify as ‘not racist’: to avoid reckoning with the ways that whiteness, even as a construction and mirage, has informed their notions of America, and identity and offered them privilege; the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. (Chap. 12)

Freedom to explore

Writers of non-fiction, like journalists, will sometimes leave reality behind and dip into the “freedom” of fiction. I’ve heard them use that word: freedom. Lucky so-and-so’s I’d think… I only wish I could feel freedom in inventing a story. In fact, I’m very much like Mary Karr who wrote: “I just have zero talent for making stuff up. While I adore the short story form, any time I tried penning one myself, everybody was either dead by page two, or morphed back into the person they’d actually evolved from in memory.” (The Art of Memoir, p. 21)

Lately, I’ve been reading Amy Tan’s memoir, Where the Past Begins. She describes her talent for realistic drawing, and I’m annoyed… here again, a writer who is an artist besides? Harrumph! Put a marker in my hand and I freeze the same way one becomes immediately self-conscious before their picture is taken. But Tan explains why she chose writing over being an artist and it has to do with her childhood trauma:

It has to do with what does not happen when I draw. I’ve never experienced a sudden shivery spine-to-brain revelation that what I have drawn is a record of who I am. I don’t mix water-colour paints and think about my changing amalgam of beliefs, confusion, and fears. I don’t do shading with thoughts about death and its growing shadow as the predicted number of actuarial years left to me grows smaller. When I view a bird from an angle instead of in profile, I don’t think of the mistaken views I have held. With practice, I will become better at drawing the eye of a bird or its feet, but I can’t practice having an unexpected reckoning of my soul. All that I have mentioned - what does not happen when I draw - does occur when I write. They occurred in the earliest short stories I wrote when I was thirty-three. Then, as now, they are revelations - ones that are painful, exhilarating, transformative, and lasting in their effects. In my writing, I recognize myself.

Discovering and being able to explain why one writes is fascinating! I enjoy collecting these writerly “raison d’être”s because it shows how in one profession, there is such interesting variety. It also highlights how expanding a talent is linked to personal development. I think that ideas about freedom, in fiction or in art, suppose a kind of ease. I immediately associate art with freedom, but that is not really the case… art in one form or another is exploration and it is work just the same. The method used for the exploration is irrelevant.

Masks

I used to think I could only read one book at a time, but have since become a promiscuous rifler of pages. Reading multiple books at once can lead to idea collages across genres. Take for example Amy Tan’s thoughts on photographs in Where the Past Begins:

I used to think photographs were more accurate than bare memory because they capture moments as they were, making them indisputable. They are like hard facts, whereas aging memory is impressionistic and selective in details, much like fiction is. But now, having gone through the archives, I realize that photos also distort what is really being captured. To get the best shot, the messiness is shoved to the side, the weedy yard is out of the shot. The images are also missing context: the reason why some are missing, what happened before and after, who likes or dislikes whom, if anyone is unhappy to be there. When they heard “cheese,” they uniformly stared at the camera’s mechanical eye, and put on the happy mask, leaving a viewer fifty years later to assume everyone had a grand time.

Now compare that to a similar idea in a completely different context… In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam is explaining how the communist regime changed its citizens’ lives. Here she describes how people had appear uniformly fine:

It was essential to smile – if you didn’t, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit – if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. (…) But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh – this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.

Look how both authors use the word “mask” - Tan, a “happy mask” and Mandelstam, a “smiling mask”. It’s funny how, now, in the pandemic, the use of a mask in public has both robbed me of the ability to smile reassuringly to strangers but also provided me with the convenience of not having to make the effort if I don’t feel like it.

Keeping a blog

Writers are constantly prey to self-doubt, I mean, dare I even count myself as one of the group? It takes little for this to flare up… This American Life ran a segment about an entertainer who daily learned and memorized a ballad, recorded and posted it to Youtube, a habit that has lead to there being more than 1000 videos posted to his account. The story felt deflating.

Then, on cue, to revive my drooping spirits, to make a case against the futility of effort, I read Cory Doctorow’s post, “The Memex Method” shared on Tyler Cowan’s blog. Here are five things I especially appreciated:

1. “The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. (…) Writing for a notional audience - particularly an audience of strangers - demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I’m taking notes for myself. (…) Writing for an audience keeps me honest.”

2. “Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research - it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or short story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet.” (This is mentioned by Austin Kleon too).

3. “(…) if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled. Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial - it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.”

4. “There’s another way that blogging makes my writing better: writing every day makes it easier to write every day.”

5. “As a blogger I’ve enjoyed the delirious freedom to write exactly the publication I’d want to read, which then attracts other people who feel the same way.”

Writing inspo

Excerpt from an interview with Jiayang Fan on the Longform Podcast:

I guess what I would want to encourage in aspiring writers who have scraped up against that self-doubt as a result of a life not lived, you know, for a career in journalism, is that, please write into your self-doubt; write into that sense that perhaps you are not deserving. There’s something authentic and pure in that voice and your investigations into yourself and the world deserves to know the quality of your uncertainty and there is something very, very edifying, I think, to the world to know about the really complicated barriers between a writer’s lack of sense of self and the self that emerges on the page. And that we need you - I’m speaking directly to those writers now - we need you more than ever because you give us something that writers from traditional backgrounds, in all their certainty and grace and eloquence, cannot, which is, you know, the truest exploration of how a self becomes a self and to those writers, please continue listening to podcasts like these ones and also to believe that you have something really worthy of being heard.

Marilynne Robinson wrote in her essay collection titled The Givenness of Things:

I hope I will not seem eccentric when I say that God’s love for the world is something it is also useful to ponder. Imagine humankind acting freely within the very broad limits of its gifts, its capacity for discerning the good and just and shaping the beautiful. If God has taken pleasure in his creation, there is every reason to assume that some part of his pleasure is in your best idea, your most generous impulse, your most disciplined thinking on whatever is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, excellent, and worthy of praise. I am paraphrasing Paul, of course, but if you have read Cicero or The Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, you know that pre-Christians and pagans made art and literature and philosophy excellent and worthy of praise, out of love for the thought of all these things. (…) My point is simply that, from the time the first hominid looked up at the stars and was amazed by them, a sweet savor has been rising from this earth, every part of it - a silent music worthy of God’s pleasure. What we have expressed compared with what we have found no way to express, is overwhelmingly the lesser part. Loyalties and tenderness that we are scarcely aware of might seem, from a divine perspective, the most beautiful things in creation, even in their evanescence. Such things are universally human. They forbid the distinctions “us” and “them”.

Three little encouragements

Sometimes, just by chance, you are listening to something, like a routine podcast on your podcast feed, and something is explained in a meaningful way. Recently, for me, it happened when Chani Nichols was describing to Debbie Millman the paradox she felt of needing to write and the intense self-doubt it unleashed. (See here). About 37 minutes into the podcast, Debbie Millman had asked: “I understand that when you first started writing you would literally be doubled over in shame and pain and self-doubt, but it also felt like something you had to do. Where did that pain come from?” Nichols answers the following:

I think that (…) when there’s a lot of neglect or you feel invisibilized by family or culture that when you bring yourself into form by writing something or acting something or building something or making something that other people can see and that you’re giving it out to them, there’s a way all of a sudden for me, I become more real. I’m defining myself by writing these things and putting them out. For me being somebody that was so low on the priority list of the adults in my life, it just brings up the feeling of having been left and denied and betrayed and abandoned. And so it’s this weird thing, it’s like I’m actively trying to heal this and bring myself into form and bring myself into the world and yet my experience of being forgotten and invisibilized becomes more pronounced as I do that. So it is [an] experience that comes in tandem; there’s like this “yay, I put something out” and a feeling of releasing of creative spirit from myself or creative energy into the world and yet all of my survival mechanisms, “stay small, stay quiet, stay invisible so that you don’t get harassed or something bad doesn’t happen,” like there’s so much chaos in the world and my life that I just had to keep everything as small and still as possible. So it’s just all that – and trauma response I think of being more present in the world.

I’m also fascinated by the story of Robert Walser on This American Life. He was content with this simple motto: “to be small and to stay small.” (See here).

Indirectly, it relates to this little scene that Emily Carr relates in her autobiography Growing Pains. She writes:

We discussed Georgia O’Keefe’s work. I told of how I had met her in the gallery of Mr. Steiglitz.

I said, “Some of the things I think beautiful, but she herself does not seem happy when she speaks of her week.”

Miss Dreier made an impatient gesture.
“Georgia O’Keefe wants to be the greatest painter. Everyone can’t be that, but all can contribute. Does the bird in the woods care if he is the best singer? He sings because he is happy. It is the altogether-happiness which makes one grand, great chorus.”

In 2019, I made it a project to read more about old age

Here are a few quotes that have stuck with me.

First off, Ann Patchet’s story called Love Sustained.

“My grandmother had spent her life taking care of other people, cooking their food, cleaning their houses. It was her proof that she was valuable in the world. Now I cleaned my grandmother’s apartment, which hurt her every single time. My cleaning was an accusation, no matter how quietly I went about it.”

“There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, ‘How far would you go for me?’ you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, ‘Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.’”

Then Diana Athill’s book Somewhere Towards the End

“… but once that involuntary protest was over I hit my stride, becoming quite good at suspending my life, which is what has to be done when living with an old person. You buy and cook the food that suits her, eat it at her set mealtimes, work in the garden according to her instructions, put your own work aside, don’t listen to music because her hearing aid distorts it, and talk almost exclusively about her interests. She is no longer able to adapt to other people’s needs and tastes, and you are there to enable her to indulge her own.”

And Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty

“However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.”

“People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be goodhearted, and is always condescending. (…) When kindness to the old is condescending, it is aware of itself as benignity while it asserts its power.”

Gabrielle Roy wrote in Ces enfants de ma vie

« De toutes les prisons que l’être humain se forge pour lui-même ou qu’il a à subir, aucun, encore aujourd’hui, ne me parait aussi intolérable que celle où l’enferme la vieillesse. »

Jane Gross wrote a helpful book about her experience taking care of her mother. It is called A Bittersweet Season and the following quote is about how brothers and sisters deal differently with their aging parents, something that she reiterates throughout her book.

“I believe this kind of remark is often a gender difference, and also a matter of temperament. When some angry adult daughters commented on the blog about their brothers’ deficiencies, I suggested, with wisdom that came to me years too late, that this was no time for a feminist hissy fit, which they obviously found politically incorrect and so turned their anger on me. I didn’t mind. But having done my time, so to speak, and wasted a ton of energy wanting Michael to worry in the same way I worried, and to be good at the same things I was good at, I have come to believe it is not sensible to be mad that someone else has a Y chromosome and you don’t. Put him in charge of the check book, not compression stockings. And certainly don’t fume because you’re obsessing and he isn’t.”

Gross also summarizes one of the ways society has changed.

“The changes wrought by the women’s movement have transformed how we care for our aged parents, a social dimension that exacerbates the current demographic one. In earlier generations, few women worked outside the home, and elder care was their responsibility, daughters and daughters-in-law alike. A woman took care of her frail mothers or mother-in-law at home - no easy task. But she would have been home anyway. Also, families were larger and less likely to be scattered, so an ailing parent would have had more hands on deck.”

This is something Mary Pipher writes too, in Another Country.

“Adults have always worried about aging parents, but our current situation is unique. Never before have so many people lived so far away from the old people they loved. And never have old people lived to be so old.” 

Pipher imparts a very tender understanding of old people.

“Those last years can be difficult, but also redemptive. As we care for our parents, we teach our children to care for us. As we see our parents age, we learn to age with courage and dignity. If the years are handled well, the old and young can help each other grow.”

“The two biggest changes over the course of this century have been our move from a pre-psychology to a post-psychology culture and our move from a communal to an individualistic culture. Most older people grew up surrounded by family. They shared bedrooms with half a dozen siblings and had grandparents or great-aunts in their homes or living nearby. They knew their neighbours, and their fun was other people. They tend to be gregarious and communal and turn toward others for support and entertainment.”

“For example, Great-aunt Martha’s concern about what the neighbours think isn’t necessarily superficial, as we tend to view such concerns in our independence-loving 1990s. Rather it is about respect and connection, about having a proper place in a communal universe.”

“They definitely did not state their own needs. In my experience, it is hard to get older women to say what they want. They have been trained to be indirect.”

“In the past, women’s roles were about enabling others to succeed. Women defined themselves by their service to others. Today, women have gone from basking in reflected glory to seeking their own glory. Sometimes this shift causes friction between women my age and their mothers.”

“Humans are wired so that we grow to love what we care for and hate what we abuse and ignore. What is loved reveals its loveliness. We mend what we value, and we value what we mend.”

“I witnessed the incredible calculus of old age - that as more is taken, there is more love for what remains. The great lesson to be learned in this last developmental stage is acceptance. That lesson well learned brings serenity. In the end, everything is about love.”