Posted on by Asia Lenae · 7 Comments

Proust on How to Be Happy in Love

lovers“Who, being loved, is poor?” witty master of aphorisms Oscar Wilde once wondered.  Though it might be an overstatement to say “all you need is love,” ancient philosophers and contemporary science agree that satisfying relationships are a crucial component, if not the crucial component, of human happiness.  In one of the longest studies of its kind, the Harvard Study of Adult Development followed 724 men in hopes of discovering the secrets to a good life.  Over the course of nearly 80 years, they observed their defeats and triumphs, their careers and love lives.  What they found was astonishing: more than IQ, social class, or genetics, quality relationships, particularly marriages, were the number one determiner of a fulfilling existence.  Not only did a harmonious matrimony dictate their overall life satisfaction— it had a far-reaching impact on their health.  Those in loving marriages, not those who had achieved wealth or prestige or our societal ideal of social status, were found to live longer than both their unmarried and unhappily married counterparts.  In fact, those who were most satisfied in their relationships at age fifty were the healthiest group at eighty.  Marital contentment was even a better predictor of later health than cholesterol.

Because meaningful relationships are so critical to our emotional and physical health, we should be alarmed by the current state of romantic love.  In the U.S. alone, nearly half of marriages end in divorce.  My generation is more reluctant to get married and often postpones, if not completely forgoes, tying the knot.  Though the rise of casual hookup apps like Tinder give the impression that millennials at least have red-hot sex lives, they’re actually having less sex than young people a generation ago.  Experts attribute the “sex recession” to everything from the widespread availability of porn to increasing psychological fragility and fear of intimacy (after all, masturbating to a cold blue computer screen requires a lot less vulnerability than being intimate with someone).  Still others argue the advent of online dating has made approaching the opposite sex in public socially awkward, even taboo.  The result? 20% of Americans report they’re dissatisfied with their lives because they don’t have close confidantes.  

To say we in the modern era are suffering a crisis of love would be a gross understatement.  If nothing is more essential to human happiness than having a partner who can act as a lifeboat amid the sea of life’s misfortunes, it’s vital we learn how to sustain gratifying long-term relationships.  Based on our staggering divorce rates and dwindling number of sex partners, we clearly need a teacher to instruct us.  In his ever-enlightening self-help manual How Proust Can Change Your Life, British philosopher Alain de Botton argues we can find no better mentor than Marcel Proust, the fine French novelist who also taught us how to reawaken to the beauty of ordinary things, remember the benefits and limitations of reading, and avoid the lure of platitudes and cliches.  

At the beginning of the chapter “How to Be Happy in Love,” the example of the telephone illustrates the difficulty of keeping a long-term relationship alive.  When first invented, we stood before the telephone astounded at its ability to allow us to communicate across once unsurpassable distances.  Now, with just the dial of a few numbers, we could speak to someone over seven thousand miles away in Mumbai from the comfort of our studio apartment in New York.  But within a span of only a few decades, this technological wonder became just another staple of the average household, as commonplace as cutlery and cutting boards:

“Take the unemotive example of the telephone.  Bell invented it in 1876.  By 1900, there were thirty thousand phones in France.  Proust acquired one and particularly liked a service called the “theater-phone,” which allowed him to listen to live opera and theater in Paris venues.  

He might have appreciated his phone, but he noted how quickly everyone else began taking theirs for granted.  As early as 1907, he wrote that the machine was

a supernatural instrument whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream.

Moreover, if the confiserie had a busy line or the connection to the tailor a hum, instead of admiring the technological advances that had frustrated our sophisticated desires, we tended to act with childish ingratitude.  

Since we are children who play with divine forces without shuddering before their mystery, we only find the telephone “convenient,” or rather, as we are spoilt children, we find that “it isn’t convenient,” we fill Le Figaro with our complaints. 

A mere thirty-one years separated Bell’s invention from Proust’s sad observations on the state of  French telephone-appreciation.  It had taken little more than three decades for a technological marvel to cease attracting admiring glances and turn into a household object that we wouldn’t hesitate to condemn were we to suffer at its hands the minor inconvenience of a delayed glace au chocolate.”

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Just as we take even the most miraculous technological innovations for granted once they become part of our day-to-day, we ungrateful mortals struggle to appreciate our significant others once we’ve committed to lifelong monogamy.  Recalling the narrator of Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time, Botton suggests our capacity for appreciation diminishes as something becomes more familiar:

“As a boy, Proust’s narrator longs to befriend the beautiful, vivacious Gilberte, whom he has met playing in the Champs-Elysees.  Eventually, his wish comes true.  Gilberte becomes his friend, and invites him regularly to tea at her house.  There she cuts him slices of cake, ministers to his needs, and treats him with great affection.  

He is happy, but, soon enough, not as happy as he should be.  For so long, the idea of having tea at Gilberte’s house was like a vague, chimerical dream, but after quarter of an hour in her drawing room, it is the time before he knew her, before she was cutting him cake and showering him with affection, that starts to grow chimerical and vague.  

The outcome can only be a certain blindness to the favors he is enjoying.  He will soon forget what there is to be grateful for because the memory of a Gilberte-less life will fade, and with it, evidence of what there is to savor.  The smile on Gilberte’s face, the luxury of her tea, and the warmth of her manners will eventually become such a familiar part of his life that there will be as much incentive to notice them as there is to notice omnipresent elements like trees, clouds, and telephones.” 

At the cornerstone of both Botton and Proust’s conception of a fulfilling life is the ability to see clearly— and not just in the literal sense of visually discerning an object in physical reality, but in the deeper sense of seeing the world in all its miraculous grandeur and beauty.  While artists are experts at looking closely, we in regular life often fail to exercise our perceptive faculties.  We might “see” a night sky but never notice the way charcoal clouds blot out an erie moon, the way the silhouettes of bare branches form a sinister backdrop to a still autumn night.  We might “see” our husband or wife but never notice, truly notice, their rare ability to listen or the sweetness of their dimples or the innocence of their eyes.  It is a tragic irony that the more we see an object, the more we become blind:

“Though we usually assume that seeing an object requires us to have visual contact with it, and that seeing a mountain involves visiting the Alps and opening our eyes, this may only be the first and in a sense the inferior part of seeing, for appreciating an object properly may also require us to re-create it in our mind’s eye.  

After looking at a mountain, if we shut our lids and dwell on the scene internally, we are led to seize on its important details.  The mass of visual information is interpreted and the mountain’s salient features identified: its granite peaks, its glacial indentations, the mist hovering above the tree line— details that we would previously have seen but not for that matter noticed.

 […]

Having something physically present sets up far from ideal circumstances in which to notice it.  Presence may in fact be the very element that encourages us to ignore or neglect it, because we feel we have done all the work simply in securing visual contact.” 

In the Proustian worldview, the key to marital bliss, in fact any bliss, is looking anew: in other words, noticing, not just seeing, our partners.  Because the institution of marriage requires we live with the same person day after day, we begin to think we’ve charted the entire map of our lover’s heart; after all, after so much time together, how could any territory of his nature possibly remain unplumbed?  But this sense of familiarity is a mirage: though physical proximity ensures we literally see our partners, we rarely notice the many facets that comprise who they are.  As Mary Gaitskill observes, man is as multi-dimensional as a Russian nesting doll: he projects an outward public persona that conceals countless other selves.  The routine nature of matrimony convinces us there’s no land of our lover left to explore when in actuality there’s still many new worlds and many new shores.

So how, exactly, can we apply these insights to be happier in love?  Rather than regard our husbands with the blasé indifference that extinguishes the flames of millions of marriages (“How was your day?” we ask more out of obligation than genuine interest), we can reignite passion by pretending we’re first getting to know each other:

“Deprivation quickly drives us into the process of appreciation, which is not to say that we have to be deprived in order to appreciate things, but rather that we should learn a lesson from what we naturally do when we lack something, and apply it to conditions where we don’t.

If long acquaintance with a lover so often breeds boredom, breeds a sense of knowing the person too well, the problem may ironically be that we do not know him or her well enough.  Whereas the initial novelty of the relationship could leave us in no doubt as to our ignorance, the subsequent reliable physical presence of the lover and the routines of communal life can delude us into thinking that we have achieved genuine, and dull, familiarity; whereas it may be no more than a fake sense of familiarity that physical presence fosters.”

It is a rule of human nature that desire begins with denial, infatuation with inaccessibility.  After all, who consumes us with the most ardent longing: our husbands whom we’ve managed to acquire or the sharply-dressed guy in the break room we barely converse with but see once in awhile?  In high school, who was our helpless obsession: our sweetest, most considerate guy friend or the hot punk we only observed from afar?  What lies just beyond our grasp is what most tantalizes us.  Proust was well aware of this fact.  “There is no doubt that a person’s charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: ‘No, this evening I shan’t be free,'” he once said.

Why is it that the rebuff of a dinner invitation makes a love interest all the more attractive?  For Proust, the answer once again rests in this idea of seeing vs. noticing: because our capacity for appreciation is gradually dulled by the habitual nature of domesticity, we merely see our long-term partners instead of notice them.  If couples don’t make a conscious and consistent effort to stoke the flames of romance, the intensity of desire they once felt will most certainly wane until what was once a lustful blaze will be smothered by the monotony of routine.  Our lovers will no longer hold interest for us because we know them too intimately (or, that is, we think we know them too intimately).

The man in the break room, on the other hand, will continue to allure us because he carries an aura of mystery.  Because our desire for him has not been fulfilled, he remains enticing.  The fact that he’s a distant crush and not a husband explains why he’s a source of fascination: the moment a lust is gratified, the moment when what we desperately yearn for is finally possessed is almost always unsatisfying— at least, not as satisfying as we imagined.  Attainment is ultimately disenchanting.  It is the delay of gratification, it is the not having that makes everything from a potential lover to a pair of shoes appealing.  In Search for Lost Time demonstrates this lesson through the characters of the Duchess and Albertine: 

“Both Albertine and the Duchess de Guermantes are interested in fashion.  However, Albertine has very little money and the Duchess owns half of France.  The Duchesse’s wardrobes are therefore overflowing; as soon as she sees something she wants, she can send for her dressmaker and her desire is fulfilled as rapidly as hands can sew.  Albertine, on the other hand, can hardly buy anything, and has to think at length before she does so.  She spends hours studying clothes, dreaming of a particular coat or hat or dressing gown.  The result is that though Albertine has far fewer clothes than the Duchesse, her understanding, appreciation, and love of them is far greater.

[…]

Proust compares Albertine to a student who visits Dresden after cultivating a desire to see a particular painting, whereas the Duchesse is likely a wealthy tourist who travels without any desire or knowledge, and experiences nothing but bewilderment, boredom and exhaustion when she arrives.  

Which emphasizes the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation.  If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or buy a dress after they have just seen it in a catalog, they are cursed because the speed with which their wealth fulfills their desires.  No sooner have they thought of Dresden than they can be on a train there; no sooner have they seen a dress than it can be in their wardrobe.  They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn’t free that evening.”

french women.jpg

Now let’s turn to a more controversial topic: sex.  What did the legendary French author have to say about getting busy between the sheets?  Throughout time, women were told chastity was a requisite for finding a husband.  Even after the feminist and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s, our mothers still clung to the conservative belief that we should wait as long as possible before engaging in the ultimate act of intimacy.  “Why would a man buy the whole ice cream truck if you’re giving away the popsicles for free?” they cautioned.  In other words, why would a man ever exchange vows to remain faithful in “sickness and health” if he already achieved his ultimate aim?  

Though as a culture we no longer hold the outdated belief that a woman needs to remain “pure” to be attractive, Proust might say our mothers— for all their antiquated ideas of gender roles and offensive double standards— were in some ways correct.  “Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess are the only interesting ones,” he once wrote.  Now, before we condemn Proust as an unforgivable misogynist, he believed this principle equally applied to men.  If love is three quarters curiosity as quintessential lady’s man Casanova once said, love wilts as familiarity grows.

Compare your attitude toward where you live to an exotic locale.  What do you look at with more longing: the cobblestone streets and sparkling waters of Venice or the well-trotted roads of your daily route?  Obviously, the former.  However, if you could too easily secure the object of your desire, if because of an overflowing bank account or an abundance of frequent flier miles, you could fly halfway across the world at whim to gaze upon St. Mark’s Basilica, the experience would be less satisfying.  Within an hour of suffering the impossibly long lines of an Italian summer, you’d be dreaming of yet another faraway destination: the idyllic English countryside, perhaps, or a breathtaking beach in the Caribbean.

This elucidates the basis of Proust’s theory of desire: we are incapable of appreciating what can be obtained with little effort.  If we sleep with someone on the first date (or even the second or third), there’s no more mystery, curiosity: the once exciting possibility of traversing the societal boundaries of clothes and exploring the forbidden territory of another’s body becomes as boring and predictable as our well-trodden route to work.  For Proust, this was the fundamental problem with the prostitute: “because she both wishes to entice a man and yet is commercially prevented from doing what is most likely to encourage love— namely, tell him that she is not free tonight…the outcome is clear, and therefore real, lasting desire unlikely.”  So if we want to captivate our lovers, we must maintain the mystery.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 12 Comments

Proust on How Art Reawakens Us to the Extraordinary Beauty of Ordinary Things

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In his pragmatic self-help manual How Proust Can Change Your Life, British philosopher Alain de Botton, the same boundlessly charming mind who offered a surprising remedy to status anxiety and shed light on the psychology behind why we travel, argues Proust (and artists like him) can open our eyes to the world’s limitless but often overlooked beauty.  Though de Botton is a bookish academic who possesses seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of literature, art, and philosophy, he’s never pretentious.  Far from the dry intellectualism of a university textbook, his work emits a playful exuberance— and a sense that he doesn’t take anything too seriously.  The common thread that unites his books is a belief that the great thinkers of the past have invaluable lessons to teach.  After sifting through Proust’s diaries, letters, novels, and essays, De Botton distills his prolific literary output into digestible advice for the modern reader.  The result?  An indispensable guide to being happy in love, remembering the benefits and limitations of reading, and expressing yourself precisely while avoiding the lure of platitudes and cliches.  How Proust Can Change Your Life’s every beautifully-patterned sentence sparkles with wit and wry humor, every word, with erudition and insight.  So if you’re curious why one of the finest minds of the 20th century believed you should never worship books too zealously or sleep with someone on the first date, check out this book from the library. 

The book’s seventh chapter “How to Open Your Eyes” begins with a summary of Proust’s essay “Chardin: The Essence of Things” which recounts the story of a disgruntled aesthete.  A cultured young man of worldly sophistication and refined taste, he worships at the temple of beauty.  Because his imagination is full of the glory of cathedrals and museums, he’s offended by the mundanity of his surroundings: in his dreary domestic settings the only thing to behold is “one last knife” lying next to an “underdone, unsavory cutlet” on a “half-removed tablecloth.”  The sole object of beauty—a “ray of sun shine”— only serves to accentuate as “cruelly as an ironic laugh” the everyday banality of his existence.  Why hadn’t he been born into a rich, noble family and been blessed to live among luxurious furnishings and fine art?  He envied the socialites who floated from grand party to grand party, the dapper aristocrats and chicly-dressed debutantes.

Deprived of beauty in his bland surroundings, the man flees to the Louvre.  The stately portraits of Van Dyck, the rich colors and magnificent palaces of Veronese, the spectacular landscapes of Lorrain: these masterpieces, he believes, will finally nourish his starved aesthete’s soul.  But rather than let him hurry to the galleries of Van Dyck and Veronese, Proust redirects him to the French painter Jean-Baptiste Chardin.  A painter of still lives and domestic scenes, Chardin prefers bowls of fruit to grand palaces and English statesmen.  His subjects are rarely engaged in anything noteworthy: rather they’re doing needlework, stirring tea, building a house of cards or carrying loaves of bread. 

wine & loaf of bread

But though Chardin depicts commonplace people in commonplace settings, his paintings reawaken us to the extraordinary splendor hidden beneath the ordinary.  The breathtaking beauty of white flowers delicately arranged next to a basket of richly red strawberries; the subtle elegance of a glass of Cabernet and loaf of bread; the splendid luster of copper cookery: through his devoted attention to detail, Chardin restores our ability to see transcendence in the mundane and therefore broadens our conception of beauty.  Once the young man was “dazzled by this rich painting of what he called mediocrity, this zestful painting of a life that he found tasteless, this great art depicting a subject that he considered mean,” Proust asks:

“This makes you happy, doesn’t it?  Yet what more have you seen here than a well-to-do middle-class woman pointing out to her daughter the mistakes she has made in her tapestry work; a woman carrying bread; the interior of a kitchen where a live cat is trampling on some oysters while a dead fish hangs on the wall, and an already half-cleared sideboard on which some knives are scattered on the cloth?”

For Proust, this young man is so discontented not because his existence is actually beauty-starved but because he’s imperceptive.  As Chardin demonstrates, there’s no reason to envy the lavish lifestyles of aristocrats or covet the glamorous circles of the rich— he can find as much poetry in a simple bouquet of flowers as in a volume of Shakespeare, as much rapture in classic blue-and-white china as in Beethoven’s Fifth.  The young man can’t behold all the exquisite beauty around him, not because of some shortage in his surroundings, but because of his own dullness of vision (“If your everyday life seems poor,” Rilke wrote to an aspiring young poet, “don’t blame it; blame yourself…you were not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.”)  Thankfully, the discerning eyes of artists like Chardin can resharpen our deadened, desensitized powers of perception.

the silver cup

At its foundation, How Proust Can Change Your Life suggests, much like Proust’s dispirited aesthete, we world-weary adults take life for granted.  Blinded by the shroud of custom and habit, we no longer see the miracle of the ordinary.  For Proust, art is our only hope of resuscitating the senses.  The artist, through his acute sensitivity and appreciative awareness, restores to the world a sense of awe and wonder, enlarging our definition of beauty to accommodate the mundane material of life we usually neglect.  A madeline and cup of lime-blossom tea, a bowl of peaches, a wedge of brie and slice of bread: when our eyes are no longer obscured by routine, the most unremarkable things reveal themselves worthy of appreciation.  

The tragedy of our times is our conception of aesthetics is too small, too narrow.  Most of us think beauty is restricted to the rarefied world of high culture, something as inaccessible as Van Gogh’s “Wheat Fields with Cypresses” at the Metropolitan Museum.  Beauty, we believe, is sunsets and red roses and brides on their wedding day — not slate skies, withered flowers, and street corner whores.  So when we look upon our vulgar day-to-day, we feel dissatisfied, bored.  Art is so essential because it reminds us beauty exists not just in Italian Renaissance paintings but underdone, unsavory cutlets on half-removed tablecloths. 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 5 Comments

Andre Dubus III on Writing as Dreaming, not Thinking

andre dubus III

In yet another restorative essay from Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process, the same treasure trove that gave us the encouraging words of Yiyun Li, Khaled Hosseini, Mary Gaitskill and Elizabeth Gilbert, novelist Andre Dubus III adds his own insights to the storehouse of wisdom on the craft.  After he stumbled upon Richard Bausch’s dictum “Do not think, dream” in the soul-nourishing Letters to a Fiction Writer, a compendium of letters from literary artists as acclaimed as Joyce Carol Oates, Ray Bradbury, and Raymond Carver, it became the bedrock of his writing philosophy.  Today the phrase acts as an eternal reminder that art belongs first and foremost to the imagination, not rationality:

“We’re all born with an imagination.  Everybody gets one.  And I really believe—this is just from years of daily writing—that good fiction comes from the same place as our dreams.  I think the desire to step into someone else’s dream world, is a universal impulse that’s shared by us all.  That’s what fiction is.  As a writing teacher, if I say nothing else to my students, it’s this.

Here’s the distinction.  There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it.  You’re making something up when you think out a scene, when you’re being logical about it.  You think, “I need this to happen so some other thing can happen.”  There’s an aspect of controlling the material that I don’t think is artful.  I think it leads to contrived work, frankly, no matter how beautifully written it might be.  You can hear the false note in this kind of writing. 

This was my main problem when I was just starting out: I was trying to say something.  When I began to write, I was deeply self-conscious.  I was writing stories hoping they would say something thematic, or address something that I was wrestling with philosophically.  I’ve learned, for me at least, it’s a dead road.  It’s writing from the outside in instead of the inside out.

But during my very early writing, certainly before I’d published, I began to learn characters will come alive if you back the fuck off.  It was exciting, and even a little terrifying.  If you allow them to do what they’re going to do, think and feel what they’re going to think and feel, things start to happen on their own.  It’s a beautiful and exciting alchemy.  And all these years later, that’s the thrill I write to get: to feel things start to happen on their own.

So I’ve learned over the years to free-fall into what’s happening.  What happens then is, you start writing something you don’t even really want to write about.  Things start to happen under your pencil that you don’t want to happen, or don’t understand.  But that’s when the work starts to have a beating heart.”

As writer, teacher and creativity guru Julia Cameron argues in her transformative The Artist’s Way, writing is about getting something down— not thinking something up.  Andre Dubus III is a devoted adherent to this school of thought.  Rather than consciously manufacture a contrived plot, what Cameron would call “think something up” forcefully from intellect and egotistic self-will, Dubus maintains the novelist must simply listen to the whisperings of inspiration and write down the story as it naturally unfolds.  What does he see in his imagination?  what does he hear?  smell?  

Though aspiring writers imagine constructing a novel is a methodical, orderly affair with clearly discrete, delineated steps like they were taught in school, the actual act of writing is a far messier process.  Most accomplished novelists will tell you they rarely have a complete conception of a book when they first get started: they might have an idea of how it will begin and end but how it will ultimately get from point a to point b remains a mystery.  Much like legendary journalist Joan Didion who asserted writing was a voyage of discovery (“I write,” she confessed, “to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.  What I want and what I fear.”) or Agnes De Mille who claimed to create was a daring act of faith (“The artist never entirely knows,” she wisely observed, “We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”), Dubus believes writing requires we relinquish control, embrace uncertainty, and simply trust:

“So you can dream by being curious—by being curious enough to report back what’s in front of your narrative eye.  I love that line from E.L. Doctorow: “Writing a novel is like driving at night.  You can only see as far as your headlights—” but you keep going until you get there.  I’ve learned over the years to just report back anything that I see in front of the headlights: Are they yellow stripes or white?  What’s on the side of the road?  Is there vegetation?  What kind?  What’s the weather?  What are the sounds?  If I capture the experience all along the way, the structure starts to reveal itself.  My guiding force and principle for shaping the story is to just follow the headlights.  That’s how the architecture is revealed.”

Ultimately, there are two distinct stages of the writing process: the “dreaming” and the “thinking”— or the creative and the critical.  The creative phase is formless, freewheeling, disorderly, intuitive, irrational whereas the critical is structured and systematic, analytical and logical.  If the creative phase is brainstorming and free writing, the critical is revising what we initially wrote.  For Dubus, dreaming and thinking are opposing but equally essential parts of the creative process: were we to write without first permitting the fun-loving partygoer of free association and exploratory imagination play, we’d produce only the most stiff ideas and dull cliches— if, that is, we wrote at all.  But if we never unleashed our stern, serious-minded school teacher onto our first drafts, we’d only have sloppy raw material.  The final critical stage is about evaluating what’s there.  Do our words clearly communicate our meaning or is there potential for misunderstanding?  Do we need to cut and condense or elaborate?  Do our style and voice convey the appropriate mood and tone?  After all, if we’re writing to reach the masses, we don’t want to employ the erudite, high-brow vocabulary of the New Yorker.  To write well we have to answer these questions as objectively as possible.

But how can we reach the peak of objectivity necessary to survey the land of our own ideas?  Dubus, much like Zadie Smith and Brenda Ueland, recommends letting some time elapse between the two stages as distance helps us regain a level of impartiality toward our work.  When we’re immersed in the task of writing, toiling at the page day after day, we naturally become attached to what we’ve written.  There’s a reason for the widespread metaphor of writing as childbirth: our writing is our baby, a fragile, delicate, shrieking thing we labored to create and therefore want to protect.  In much the same way our water breaks at the most inconvenient moment, an idea whispers into our ear begging (sometimes demanding) to be brought into existence.  So we obey the muse and write.  Like childbirth, the actual process of articulating ourselves is excruciating.  As we endeavor for months, sometimes years, to birth our idea, our yet born child wrenches our insides until we’re in so much pain we’re shouting obscenities at blameless nurses and cursing God as we race through emergency room corridors.  When the agony of labor is finally over and we’re gazing at our angelic child in the peaceful quiet of a white hospital room, we’re overcome by indescribable gratitude: we, mere mortals, miraculously created this living, breathing thing, a sentient being with consciousness and ten toes and fingers!  Is it any wonder we find it difficult to dispassionately evaluate our words?

No matter how unbearable it feels to “kill your darlings” as the oft repeated advice counsels, Dubus argues the difference between a good book and a great book is a ruthless attitude toward our work.  No matter how burdensome a word or laborious a line was to bring into being, no matter how strong our affection for a particularly graceful turn-of-phrase, we have to be willing to part with any sentence that doesn’t further our aim:

“Now, dreaming your way through a story is very useful at first—for the first draft, maybe the first two drafts.  But once the revision process begins, you’ve got to change your approach.  Bausch would be the first to say that once you dream it through, try to look at the result the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.  You’ve got to be terribly smart about it.  In the secondary period, you get more rational and logical about what you’ve dreamt—while still cooperating with the deeper truths of what you’ve made.

So once I have a beginning, middle, and end, I walk away from it for at least six months and don’t look at it.  At least six months.  To revise means “to see again”—well, how can you see again when you just looked at it 10 days ago?  No.  Have two seasons go between you.  And then when you pick it up and read it, you actually forget some of what happens in the story.  You forget how hard it was to write those 12 pages.  And you become tougher on it.  You see closer to what the reader is going to see.

What I look for at this point is dramatic tension, forward movement, and, frankly, beauty.  I try to make it as truly itself as possible.  And that’s when the major plotting comes in—plot, not as a noun but as a verb—the ordering of events and material.  I get really merciless.  I don’t care if I spent a year writing pages 1 through 96.  If I feel some real energy on page 93, and I think that should be page 1?  Those first 92 pages are fucking gone.  A merciless reviser is in a much better position to write a really good book than one who hasn’t got the stomach for it.  That may be the distinction between what makes a really good book and a great book.”

Though Dubus would never call himself a religious man, writing has convinced him something is out there— maybe not God, a word too narrow a linguistic box to allow for mystery and too overburdened with intolerance and bloodshed— but some sort of higher power.  The imagination, the subconscious, the universal life force, fate, destiny, the almighty infinite spirit, the holy ghost, God: whatever term we prefer, Dubus believes creativity is a way of making contact with the unknowable.  Speaking of his opera Madame Butterfly, Puccini confessed, “The music was dictated to me by God.  I was merely instrumental in getting it on paper.”  Even the most adamantly secular among us can admit we too have had the mystical experience of being a vessel, of our words coming not from our own minds but from somewhere else.  For Dubus, being an artist requires we simply transcribe what is dictated to us—  we don’t need to know exactly where we’re going or how it’ll turn out.  Because we live in a scientific age where we exalt definitive answers, merely having faith that page after page will order itself into something comprehensible seems stupid, borderline absurd.  Just “trust in the process”?  Ha!  It sounds like a bunch of hokey New Age nonsense.  We want assurance that all our efforts will lead to a finished product.  But art, Dubus believes, demands we take leap after leap in the dark:

“I don’t believe in God, but I believe in something: Something’s out there.  And the main reason I believe that something’s out there—something mysterious and invisible but real—largely has come from my daily practice of writing.  There’s a great line from an ancient anonymous Chinese poet: We poets knock upon the silence for an answering music.  The way I write, the way I encourage people I work with to try to write is exactly this: Trust your imagination.  Free fall into it.  See where it brings you to.  It’s scary, it’s unorganized, and you’re going to have to prepare yourself for some major fucking rewriting—and maybe cut two years of work.

I know, putting up this kind of uncertainty is very difficult.  We bring ourselves into these rooms.  We bring all of our hopes, all of our longings, all of our shadows.  What writing asks of us is the opposite of what being in the American culture asks of us.  You’re supposed to have a five-year plan.  Young people now are so cautious.  Oh, we can’t get married until we have a house.  Oh, we can’t have a baby until we have 20 grand in the bank.  These crazy, careful people!  You know, look: Life is short if you live a hundred years.  Better to die naked and reckless and with passion—and not be afraid to fuck up and fail.”

With a rebellious spirit reminiscent of Cheryl Strayed, who once told a disheartened aspiring writer “you don’t have a career, you have a life,” Dubus concludes by affirming writing is not about agents or royalties or book deals— it’s about the writing itself:

“I think one of the downsides of MFA programs is they make people really career-conscious.  Fuck career.  Let me tell you something: I’m so grateful to have had a publishing career so far.  It’s how I make most of my living.  It’s been an incredible blessing.  It’s helped me take better care of my family than I could have ever thought possible.  But I do not ever think about career when I’m in my writing cave.  I do not.  I try not to think; I dream.  It’s my mantra.  I just get in there and try to be these people.  It’s not so I can write a book and get paid and have another book tour—though those are good problems to have.  It’s because I feel an almost sacred obligation to these spirits who came before: to sit with them and write their tale.”

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