Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anna Quindlen on Writing as a Means of Figuring Out Who You Are & Remembering Who You Once Were

Why write?  Joan Didion believed we should write to discover what we’re thinking, what we’re looking at and what it means, what we want and what we fear.  Brenda Ueland thought we should put pen to page “because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it and what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover truth and beauty and express it; i.e. share it with others?”  Susan Sontag asserted we should write to create the self while Anais Nin thought we should write to discover our own voice and overcome the picky perfectionism of our inner censor.

When we write, especially in a diary, we realize we’re the authors of our own lives: we can take control of our narratives, we can rewrite our storylines.  Writing is a compass and a map that illuminates where we want to go.  Writing is a candle in a dark night and a life raft during a turbulent storm of the soul.  Writing is a source of companionship and connection, even if the only person we’re talking to is ourselves.

In her love letter to personal writing Write for Your Life, Anna Quindlen urges us to write because writing can help us figure out who we are.  The act of formulating our thoughts on a page, arranging our incoherent ideas into semantic structures of comprehensible meaning somehow makes the chaos of life more orderly.  When we order words on a page, we order ourselves.  Writing brings us clarity about who we are and what we want.  

Take Anne Frank’s famous diary.  At the time of writing, Frank was living through one of the most horrifying conflicts in human history, hiding in a small attic from the Nazis.  Her diary, whom she affectionately called Kitty, was her closest confidante.  In her war-wrecked world, musing over things in her diary was a rare source of comfort.  As Quindlen writes, 

“What sometimes gets lost, in the many decades since her father first published Anne Frank’s diary, in the millions of copies it has sold in dozens of languages, is that when she first began, Anne Frank wasn’t writing a book.  She was talking to herself.  And she was talking to herself in a way that any of us can do too.  She was finding solace in writing her life, her thoughts and feelings, day after day.  Words to live by.

Anne Frank was living through an extraordinary experience, an extraordinary time, an extraordinary horror, and to ground herself she was committing everything to paper, much of it not particularly profound.  The curtains at the windows, the cupboard to hide the door.  She writes about how everyone thinks she is badly behaved, about how much she hates algebra and geometry.  Eventually she ran out of space in the birthday diary and continued in exercise books and accounting ledgers from the office below.  In some ways she sounds like a typical teenager: a mother who doesn’t understand her, a boy she wants to be alone with.  In others, surely not: the toilet that cannot be flushed for the entire day, the enforced silence to forestall the unexpected footsteps on the stairs, the sound of those footsteps evoking terror because of what the family Frank has heard is happening in the world outside the attic.  

But Anne’s diary is also instructive about how writing, for anyone, for everyone, for you and for me, can normalize the abnormal and feed the spirit, whether during exceptional moments of history or just ordinary moments of everyday life…For young people like Anne, it’s a way of understanding yourself, hearing your own voice, puzzling out your identity.”

One of the greatest joys of keeping a diary is sifting through it many years later.  The tattered pages transport us to an entirely different epoch, an entirely different era: when we left home for college, when we thought metal heads with Jesus hair were cute.  A diary is both a time capsule and a scrapbook.  Rereading our diary, we become historians attempting to understand another time, another civilization, another culture.  Or, as Joan Didion once said, writing is a way to keep us on nodding terms with the people we once were.

With characteristic eloquence, Quindlen writes, 

“For those far along in the span of their lifetimes, writing offers an opportunity to look back, a message in a bottle that says, This was life.  This was how it was, this was who I was.”

In this way, writing is a means to escape our mortal coil and live forever.  When we write, we’re usually writing for ourselves: to vent, to process events, to record.  But our writing can also console our loved ones when we inevitably pass on.  In Write for Your Life, Quindlen describes the experiences of the National Writing Project’s executive director Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, whose mother spent her later years writing poems.  After her mother’s death, nothing comforted Elyse more than reading her mother’s words.  Though her mother had departed this physical realm, her spirit persisted in her poems.  Her verse could speak across the vast reaches of time and space, in this life and the hereafter.  “Writing,” Quindlen notes, “is the gift of your presence forever.”  

Meditating on the relationship between writing and memory, Quindlen uses an illustrative metaphor:

“When you write, you connect with yourself, past, present and future.  I remember myself, the little girl who wrote poems, the college applicant who said without guile or humility that her goal in life was to be a writer.  Writing can make memory concrete, and memory is such a hard thing to hold on to, like a Jell-O mold, all wiggly but with solid bits embedded clearly.”

In many ways, writing is a work of magic: it exteriorizes the interior, renders the invisible thought a visible word.  Floating and half-conscious, thoughts whirl by once and disappear; words are forever.  By capturing our fluttering thoughts and committing them to paper, we better remember.  As Quindlen so beautifully observes, 

“The point is writing is a net, catching memory and pinning it to a board like people sometimes do with butterflies like the ones we hatched.  Writing is a hedge against forgetting, forgetting forever.”

 

 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Anna Quindlen’s Passionate Plea to Preserve History

For most of us, history is a series of monumental events and larger-than-life figures.  Jesus.  Napoleon.  Alexander the Great.  Winston Churchill.  Hitler.  History is excitement, drama: the invention of the wheel, the bombing of Hiroshima.  Our history books tell the tales of great men: presidents, politicians, philosophers, poets.  Rarely do we hear the ordinary stories of ordinary women and men.

However, as Leo Tolstoy once said, history is more accurately described as “an infinitely large number of infinitely small actions”— in other words, the combined effect of the many small actions of commonplace people.  In Write for Your Life, Anna Quindlen makes a passionate plea for us to write: grocery lists and bullet point notes, diaries and love letters, novels and poems.  A populist of the page, Quindlen believes writing isn’t just for writers.  All people should write: young Jewish girls hiding from Nazis, troubled teens from 1990s Long Beach, nurses and doctors.  

But why bother?  In the book’s final chapter, Quindlen suggests writing is vital because the act of putting pen to page preserves our stories in the historical record.  Sadly in many classrooms across the country, the most compelling events of human history are reduced to a meaningless list of facts and figures.  Rather than see their own potential to contribute a chapter to the story of the world, most students understand history as a series of trivial names and dates and tedious lectures.  History— we believe— is an inaccessible textbook reserved for distant lands and boring, bygone figures.  As Quindlen observes, 

“It is a sad and undeniable fact that history comes to us drained of blood and embalmed, a penology of stiff set pieces starring great men, an array of nations and dates and documents.  In classrooms, in seminars, in books, it is too often something to memorize and too seldom something to be a part of.  The distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., once wrote, ‘History is lived in the main by the unknown and forgotten.  But historians perforce concentrate on the happy few who leave records, give speeches, write books, make fortunes, hold offices, win or lose battles and thrones.’

In the past those happy few wrote the story, turning history into an enormous, grand house, a little like the White House, chandeliers and columns and porticoes.  But where is the furniture?  We are the furniture.  The history people need to understand where we have come from, what to decry and what to prize, is not a history of presidents and generals.  It is the history of us, and one reason ordinary people must write is to leave their own records, to furnish the rooms of our country and our world.”

British philosopher Alain de Botton once said, telling a story is a process of simplification and selection.  Think about it: when you tell a story, you don’t include every single detail.  You emphasize certain things and eliminate others.  You omit, you compress, you only leave what is most relevant to the plot.  The narrator of the story determines what’s important vs. what’s not.

This is true of our larger historical stories as well.  But who has the power to narrate the stories of our nation, our civilization, our world?  Who can speak and who is silenced?  Who has a voice and who is exiled to the island of voicelessness?

Tragically, throughout time, men have told their stories while silencing the dispossessed and marginalized.  Men, specifically white men, have dictated which stories are significant and which are unworthy of our attention.  “History” is now commonly understood as relating to the public realm of war, government and politics.  But history isn’t just grand events or once-in-a-lifetime occurrences— it’s also the mundane moments.  History is a courageous young girl writing in her diary just as much as it is Pearl Harbor and Auschwitz.  The right to tell your own story (and therefore contribute to the larger story of history) belongs to every human.  If we don’t tell our stories, Quindlen warns, our experiences will be wiped from the historical record and forever forgotten:

“There are too few such stories written down, handed down, made part of history alongside the songs of exploration, economics, and government.  Relying on that kind of history provides a skewed view of the world because it is almost entirely the history of deeds done by white men, who wrote down what happened as they saw fit, picking and choosing and editing and deleting.  And so the rest of us became invisible, at best bit players in the sweep of history.”

Just as Rebecca Solnit argued journalists have the responsibility to rewrite the world’s broken narratives, Quindlen asserts citizens have a duty to tell their stories.  When we tell our stories, we reclaim our right to be seen, to be heard, to contribute a chapter to the chronicle of history.  By committing our thoughts to paper, whether that be in a major newspaper or the private pages of a diary, we’re asserting we matter, our lives matter.  As Quindlen writes, 

“If, in good times and in bad times and ordinary times, people who may not think of themselves as writers begin to set their stories down, in their own voices, in whichever way they choose, it will make history, make it truer, fairer, richer.  We need to hear from everyone, durable words, like the letters Sandy wrote to Harry as a war bride, the essays written by the nursing students at Yale, the recollections of those Kansas women making a home amid hardship.  We need the words of people whose words were unremarked in histories of the past.  If those unaccustomed to the act of everyday writing can find ways to recover the urge to sit down and produce thoughts, musings, letters for their children, their friends, the future, we will not only know what happened during their lifetimes, we will know how it felt.  As Anne Frank showed the world, as the Freedom Writers learned themselves, history is our story.  Those who write it, own it, today and always.”

Want more insight into why we should write?  Visit Anna Quindlen on why we should write and writing as a means to write who we are and remember who we once were.  Still tormented by the immortal question of why we should pen to page?  Read Joan Didion’s canonical answer in her 1976 essay of the same name.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on How All Phases of Love Are Equally Valid

All life is motion: electrons circle an atom’s nucleus, planets hurl through space.  Earth turns on its axis at a speed of roughly 1,000 miles per hour: day dissipates into night, night disappears into day.  Life hibernates in winter only to be reawakened in spring.  Nothing is stable— not even the ground beneath our feet.  Seas crash into shorelines, transforming mighty mountains into minuscule grains.  The land we stand on isn’t steady and unchanging— it’s composed of constantly shifting Tectonic plates.  We imagine life is static but if we observed a map of our Earth 250 million years ago, it would look entirely different from what it does today.

The only constant in life is change yet nothing terrifies us more than the idea that things never remain the same.  In love, we’re especially resistant to change.  The moment we sense a shift in our relationship, we become overcome by a paralyzing sense of dread.  Maybe after a few years together, our sex has become less imaginative and less frequent.  Maybe our calendars are no longer bursting with social activities and soirées and concerts and comedy shows and parties.  Maybe our love life seems like a pathetic exercise in monotony.

In the stable security of a long-term relationship, we yearn for the rapturous intoxication of young romance.  What happened to the all-night conversations, the giddy school girl excitement of getting a text message from our beloved?  What happened to the intense, impassioned, “I need to have you” sex? 

In her immeasurably insightful book Gift from the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh suggests it is natural for some of the fervor in a relationship to fade.  In much the same way that a flower wilts in winter, our romance will occasionally decay.  Nothing lasts, all is flux, all is change.  But there’s no need to worry.  Our love will be reborn in another form in the spring.  

Lindbergh spent nearly half a century married to aviator and American hero Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly across the Atlantic alone.  In their 45 years together, Anne learned firsthand the trials and tribulations of being one half of a couple.  In a lyrical passage of uncommon insight and uncommon beauty, Morrow concedes that nothing— not even love— is everlasting:

“The ‘veritable life’ of our emotions and our relationships…is intermittent.  When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.  It is an impossibility.  It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.  We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.  We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb.  We are afraid it will never return.  We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity— in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even.  Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what is was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.  For relationships, too, must be like islands.  One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits— islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides.  One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.”

Ultimately, life is a pendulum that swings between opposite poles: hope and despair, joy and sorrow.  The Lindberghs understood this fact perhaps more than any other couple.  In their 45 years together, they experienced agony and ecstasy, storms of adversity and moments of calm.  Called the “First Couple of the Skies,” Charles and Anne seemed to live a charmed life: over the course of their career, they flew tens of thousands of miles across four continents to explore transatlantic air routes.  Their work took them everywhere from the Orient to the Amazon jungle.  Both Charles and Anne were celebrated as heroes.

Despite their many triumphs, tragedy struck when their 20 month year old son, Charles, was kidnapped from his nursery and killed in the spring of 1932.  Besides having to cope with the unimaginable loss of their son, Charles and Anne had to endure the ensuing media frenzy and the paparazzi’s unremitting flashbulbs.

Much like life, our relationships pass through cycles.  The obsessive infatuation of a crush will eventually give way to steady companionship after a few years.  At times, the flames of passion will burn ferociously; at others, our desire will only be a few smoldering embers.  Over the course of a relationship, there will be affectionate nicknames and four-letter words, amorous whispers and  enraged screams, moments of domestic bliss and nights soaked in tears.  We must not glorify the honeymoon phase or fear our relationship changing as we get older.  Each phase of life, each phase of love has its own lessons to teach us.  As Morrow writes,

“Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of a relationship is valid.”

Want more wisdom from the lovely Lindbergh?  Read the pioneering aviator on love’s many phases,  why we should seek solitude and why we should shed the shell of our ordinary lives and go to the beach.