Posted on by Asia Lenae

Joan Didion on How Detours Bring Us Closer to Our Destiny

Most of us have clear ideas about how our dreams should unfold.  If we want to be movie stars, for example, we imagine our breakthrough moment will be an Academy Award or a critically-acclaimed starring role.  We dream our big break will manifest in a very specific way: a major director will notice us while we’re waiting tables; after a single audition, we’ll land our ideal part.  We imagine we’ll be “discovered” in some romantic fashion like Lana Turner, casually sipping a coke at a malt shop.  Our initiation into Tinseltown will be the legendary stuff of Hollywood lore.

But sometimes our “big break,” doesn’t seem big at all.  This, we think, wasn’t how it was supposed to go!  We were supposed to be “serious” actors— not amateurs in a 30 second McDonald’s commercial!

If we’re about to pass up an opportunity because it isn’t as glitzy or glamorous as our fantasies, because we think it’s a roundabout detour on what should be a straight and narrow path to our destiny, essayist and journalist Joan Didion would say one thing: don’t.

Didion understood that dreams don’t always come true the way we hoped.  After graduating from U.C. Berkeley in 1956, she moved to New York City to become a writer.  Her first gig was writing merchandising copy for Vogue.  Though Vogue is certainly a prestigious publication, Didion didn’t exactly imagine her “dream job” would involve writing compact 1-line captions for patent leather pumps.  Another writer might have dismissed this type of “writing” as frivolous.  But Didion saw fashion writing as a way to perfect her craft and polish her prose.  In her landmark 1978 essay “Telling Stories,” one of many characteristically clear-eyed pieces from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion realizes that her time at Vogue played a formative role in shaping the writer she’d become:

“It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’ and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words, a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toy weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.  In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted.  At Vogue one learned fast, or did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters.  We were connoisseurs of synonyms.  We were collectors of verbs.  (I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly favored noun: “ravishments,” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips, Faberge eggs, and other ravishments.”)  We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (“there were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges,” passive verbs slowed down sentences, “it” needed a reference within the scan of an eye), learned to scan the OED, learned to write and rewrite and rewrite again.  “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there.”  “Give me a shock verb two lines in.”  “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”  Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.  Going to work for Vogue was, in the 1950s, not unlike training with the Rockettes.”

It was at Vogue that Didion developed her distinctive style and terse, tough-minded prose.  Lesson?  We never know how the seeds of our dreams will blossom and grow.  For more from this stellar sentence stylist, read Ms. Didion on writing as a process of discovery and the pains & perils of self-doubt.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Joan Didion on Self-Doubt

Oscar Wilde once said, “The artist’s life is a long, lovely suicide.”  Though Wilde could be dramatic, the idea that writing is agonizing is certainly not an overstatement.  Writing is torment.  Writing is laboring all day on a single page only to toss it in the trash.  For every day of creative bliss, there are countless days when you want to quit.

To go to the blank page is to meet your demons.  When we write, we must battle that barbarous inner voice who whispers “you’re not good enough” at every turn.  Still, we write songs and sonnets because we possess a primal urge.  Writing is a way of saying “I was here.”

All writers struggle with self-doubt, whether they’re toiling away in anonymity or are widely renowned.  It’s hard to imagine someone as influential and iconic as Joan Didion questioning her own talent.  But much like Virginia Woolf— who felt inconceivably inferior compared to her idol Marcel Proust (“Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out a sentence,” she wrote to a friend in 1922)— Didion believed she was hopelessly dull compared to her infinitely more interesting peers.In “Telling Stories,” one of many incisively-observed essays from Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Didion offers a glimpse into the writer’s fragile psyche.  In the fall of 1954, Didion, who at the time was a junior at U.C. Berkeley, earned a coveted spot in writer and literary critic Mark Schorer’s English 106A.   “An initiation into the grave world of real writers,” English 106A was a writer’s workshop that required students to write five short stories.

As an inexperienced nineteen-year-old, Didion swiftly sunk into the quicksand of insecurity.  “Who am I to write?” she wondered, “Do I even have anything meaningful to say?”

Her classmates had met famous people and travelled to far-flung places.  Her own life felt uneventful by comparison.  She had never been in love or known real difficulty.  She had never had an affair in Cuba or danced all night in Harlem or sipped wine in Tuscany.  Her short life was circumscribed within the 100 square miles of her native Sacramento.  Certainly, she believed, there was nothing in her unremarkable life that could be transmuted into a short story or novel:

“I remember each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being…not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn; the stuff not only of grown-up life itself but more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff which might be transubstantiated into five short stories.  I recall a Trotskyist, then in his forties.  I recall a young woman who lived, with a barefoot man and a large white dog, in an attic lit only by candles.  I recall classroom discussions which ranged over meetings with Paul and Jane Bowles, incidents involving Djuna Barnes, years spent in Paris, in Beverley Hills, the Yucatan, on the Lower East Side of New York and on Repulse Bay and even on morphine.  I had spent seventeen of my nineteen years in Sacramento, and the other two in the Tri Delt house on Warring Street in Berkeley.  I had never read Paul or Jane Bowles, let alone met them, and when, some fifteen years later at a friend’s house in Santa Monica Canyon, I did meet Paul Bowles, I was immediately rendered as dumb and awestruck as I had been when I was nineteen and taking English 106A.”  

As a fellow English major at U.C. Berkeley, I can relate to Ms. Didion’s plight.  I—too— had to navigate the notoriously labyrinthine halls of Dwinelle as a shy, self-conscious girl in my early twenties.  As a transfer student from junior college who barely graduated high school and never dreamed of going to a prestigious four-year university, I had to constantly battle the debilitating sense that everyone in my class was somehow more qualified than me.  In the stately lecture halls of the Wheeler building, I felt unforgivably less than my bookish classmates who wore oxfords and chinos and had impressive internships at magazines.  Like Didion, I never spoke for fear my words would reveal my stupidity.  As Didion writes, 

“In short I had no past and, every Monday-Wednesday-Friday at noon in Dwinelle Hall, it seemed increasingly clear to me I had no future.  I ransacked my closet for clothes in which I might appear invisible to the class, and came up with only a dirty raincoat.  I sat in this raincoat and listened to other people’s stories read aloud and I despaired of ever knowing what they knew.  I attended every meeting of this class and never spoke once.  I managed to write only three of the five required stories.  I received— only, I think now, because Mr. Schorer, a man of infinite kindness to and acuity about his students, divined intuitively that my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that I never would be, of terror that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough— a course grade of B.”

Paralyzed by fear, Didion didn’t write another story for ten years.  For a decade, she lost the battle against her merciless inner censor.  The irony, of course, is that— despite her insistence that she wasn’t interesting/intellectual/experienced enough— she would go on to become one of the most vital voices of her generation.  

Lesson?  Even great writers suffer writer’s block and fear rejection.  For more from Didion, read about her ideas on art as expression & discovery, her time at Vogue, and her famous sense of fashion.

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Is it Useful? Is It Beautiful? William Morris on How to Declutter Your Space

In our crazed, capitalist society, we are what we consume.  Because our standing in the social hierarchy depends on how much we buy, we strive to accumulate more: more money, more real estate, more cars, more clothes.  We’re obsessed with “getting and spending” as William Wordsworth observed over two centuries ago.

The tragedy of our times is that the shopping mall has become our collective cathedral.  Rather than develop a deep interconnectedness with our fellows or believe in something greater than ourselves, we worship the material.  Ultimately, we believe the answers to our spiritual problems can be found in the racks of department stores.  

Feel isolated and lonely?  Forget connection and community.  Find consolation in the luxurious leather of Gucci.

Uncertain of your life’s purpose?  A glamorous fur coat or pair of vintage Jimmy Choos will cure your existential dread.

But this excessive cycle of “getting and spending” has serious consequences.  We are collapsing under the weight of consumer products.  Today, the average American household contains 300,000 items.  Though the size of our homes has nearly doubled over the last fifty years, nearly 10% of Americans still have to rent some sort of self–storage.  Indeed, self-storage has boomed in recent years: in 1984, there were only 6,600 storage facilities across the United States; today, there are an astounding 50,000.  In the internet age where anything can be delivered to your doorstep with a click of a mouse, it has become all too easy to accumulate more junk.

Our epidemic obsession with stuff has sparked new professions and entire industries.  Today you can hire a professional organizer to sort through your mountains of clothes and classify them by color and type in a closet worthy of Good Housekeeping.  International bestsellers like The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up teach us how to let go of things that don’t “spark joy” while retailers like the Container Store promise their orderly storage bins can contain the disarray of our lives.In her compact, befittingly uncluttered Clutter: An Untidy History, Jennifer Howard examines our relationship to the things we bring into our lives.  Interweaving her own personal experiences with meticulous research, Howard traces clutter from its beginnings in the lavish drawing rooms of the Victorian era to the overcrowded American homes of the modern day.

As we embark on a new year, many of us (myself included) have resolved to declutter our space.  How— Howard wonders— can we distinguish what to toss from what to keep?  How do we know what things to bring into our homes in the first place?

To answer this question, she turns to English designer, activist and poet William Morris (1834–1896). Morris was a central figure in the Arts & Crafts movement, which revolted against the mass production and cheap consumerism brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  Deeply troubled by the declining quality of goods, he rejected the mechanization of modern manufacturing and championed careful craftsmanship.  

The core tenets of his philosophy?  Beauty and utility.

The Arts & Crafts movement wasn’t just an artistic revolution— it was political as well.  “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion in my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization,” Morris wrote rather pessimistically in 1894.  Like the Romantic poets, who shared his distaste for modernity, Morris romanticized the past, particularly the Middle Ages.  Unlike modern factory workers on an assembly line, who were alienated from the fruits of their labor, the artisans of the past took pride in their work and felt deeply connected to the things they made.  Morris envisioned a future where the people who made our goods were artists rather than cogs in a machine.

The master of minimalism, Morris believed in quality over quantity.  He rejected the popular design trends of his day: while most Victorians favored excess and extravagance, he disliked ornamentation.  For him, a single statement piece was preferable to a mantelpiece cluttered with random tchotchkes.

So to return to our central question: when it comes to our personal space, how can we distinguish what to toss from what to keep?  

In his iconic 1880 “The Beauty of Life” speech, Morris created a handy rule of thumb.  An object should only remain in our lives if it is either beautiful or functional.  Or as Morris writes, 

“Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in our way: conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors: if you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: HAVE NOTHING IN YOUR HOUSES THAT YOU DO NOT KNOW TO BE USEFUL OR BELIEVE TO BE BEAUTIFUL.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Seneca on How To Remain Calm Amidst a Sea of Troubles

Life is a sea of frustration: we can’t seem to find our car keys when we’re already 20 minutes late for work, we pour a bowl of cereal only to discover we have no milk.

How do we react when things don’t go our way?

Most often, with flames of anger and red-hot rage. 

We hurl our coach cushions while we desperately search for our keys; we curse the cruel universe (and our inconsiderate roommate who never refills anything) for making us have to go to the grocery store first thing in the morning.  The most minor mishap can send us into a tantrum, though we should be far more mature for someone of middle age.

Why do the smallest, most insignificant things possess the power to make us so angry?

According to Seneca, father of Stoicism, anger is not an explosion of uncontrollable passions— it’s the result of an error in reasoning.  We rant and rave when our expectations collide with reality.  For example, when we were expecting to spend our Saturday soaking in the sun only to learn that the weather forecast predicts gray skies and relentless rain.  Or consider the romantic arena: we only pout and lock ourselves in our room when our husband forgets our anniversary because we expected him to romance us with extravagant gifts, a diamond necklace perhaps, or two round-trip tickets to Tahiti.

In his ever-edifying The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton suggests anger isn’t an inextinguishable wildfire— it can be contained.  According to Botton, who famously finds solutions to contemporary problems in the wrinkled pages of art, literature and philosophy, Seneca’s stoicism can stamp out our embers of exasperation before they burst into full-blown flames of rage.  Rather than expect too much from the world, we would be wise to lower our expectations and take a grimmer view of reality.

To illustrate his point, Botton uses one of Seneca’s acquaintances, Vedius Pollio.  A wealthy man from ancient Rome, Pollio lived in a world of grand gardens, gold-gilded palaces, extravagant feasts, and elaborate frescoes.  Like many rich men, Pollio was accustomed to getting his way.  When one of his slaves dropped a tray of crystal glasses during a party, Pollio was so enraged that he ordered him to be thrown into a pool of lampreys.  

Was Pollio’s reaction a tad bit extreme?  Of course: most of us wouldn’t toss someone into a pool of eels for such a silly mistake.  

So why did something so trivial (a bit of broken glass) catapult a dignified man of refined manners and good breeding into such a blind rage?

His anger seems disproportionate to its cause.  Certainly, a man of his class could have replaced the crystal.  With the commanding wave of a hand, Pollio could have had one of his hundred servants come and sweep up the shattered dishes.  Logically, there’s no reason a few broken glasses had to ruin the revelry of the evening.

However, Botton argues there’s rationale behind Pollio’s seeming irrationality: “Pollio was angry for an identifiable reason: because he believed in a world in which glasses do not get broken at parties.”  In other words, his reality (my clumsy slave tripped and smashed my precious crystal) didn’t meet his expectations (my party will proceed smoothly).  

If we want to be calm and generally content, we must learn to expect less of life.  Rather than expect circumstances to unfold according to our carefully-orchestrated plans, we should rip a page from the Stoic survivalist handbook and prepare for the worst to happen.  If— like Pollio— we’re hosting a dinner party, we should anticipate things will not go smoothly: guests will arrive that didn’t RSVP, we’ll run out of champagne, our guests will inevitably have trouble finding topics of conversation and suffer a few awkward silences as they nibble crackers and brie.

Ultimately, Stoicism suggests we relinquish rose-colored romanticism and accept reality.  No matter what, our time on this planet will be filled with rude people, interminably long lines, stolen credit card information, delayed flights, flat tires, and human stupidity.  If, as Botton writes, we reconcile ourselves to life’s necessary imperfectability, we’ll be less angry (and less likely to fling a helpless servant into a pool of lampreys). 

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Schopenhauer on Art as an Antidote to our Greatest Affliction

What is philosophy for?  For many, philosophy is a lofty subject only meant to be studied by tweed-jacketed professors in the university hall.  The word “philosopher” conjures images of men in ancient Greece or Rome who have white beards and wear long, flowy robes.  Philosophy isn’t for ordinary people like mailmen and school teachers— it’s reserved for great intellects like Nietzsche and Socrates and Plato.  Philosophers are a privileged class who have the time to ponder life’s big questions (who am I?/what am I meant to do?).

However, in his charming The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton argues just the opposite: philosophy is simply the study of how to live well.  A delightful little volume organized by afflictions such as “heartbreak,” “unpopularity,” and “not having enough money,” The Consolations of Philosophy rests on the premise that philosophy is a form of medicine.  The words of a great thinker can have restorative properties.  In this 2000 classic, the irresistibly intelligent Botton sifts through thousands of years of collective wisdom to find the wisest minds’ remedies for our most common problems.  

Do you only have $5 in your bank account, but long for luxurious pleasures such as Birkin bags and champagne-soaked meals at Michelin star restaurants?  A dose of Epicurus will remind you that happiness isn’t always found in the extravagant excesses of materialism.  Have you been driven to the brink of insanity by such tragic events as losing a loved one or such petty frustrations as losing your car keys?  Dr. Botton would write you a prescription for the Stoic philosopher Seneca.

Of all the difficulties in the modern world, loneliness is probably our most widespread problem.  In a recent national survey of American adults, 36% of respondents reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time.”  More Americans are spending time alone than ever before.

Why do rates of loneliness run rampant?  Some blame our modern alienation on the advent of social media (after all, why bother with complicated, occasionally dull human interaction when TikTok provides dizzying dopamine-fueled hits of cheap entertainment?); others blame the capitalist rat race for money and status.  Certainly, our sense of isolation only worsened during the pandemic.

Luckily, there is a cure for our loneliness.  If we’re lacking connection in real life, we can find companionship in the fictional worlds of art and books.  Books are medicines for our maladies, slings for our spirits, salves for our wounds.  To read a book— or observe a painting or contemplate a poem— is to see our own lives reflected back to us.  By expressing their particular experience, the artist illuminates an aspect of the greater human experience.  Though Tolstoy wrote Family Happiness using his own experience of marriage, the modern woman who finds herself disenchanted with domesticity can still see herself in Masha’s tale.  Books remind us other people have felt our feelings and thought our thoughts, even if it was many centuries ago.  Referencing the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Botton notes:

“We do have one advantage over moles.  We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems— and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life.  What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language, or image.  Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own.  They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.  We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insights into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them.  In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.”  

Ultimately, art dispels the illusion that we are alone in our struggles.  The dispirited can discover hope in the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh; the love sick can find solace in sonnets written by a Renaissance man nearly a half millennia ago.  Or as Botton writes, a snubbed suitor can find consolation in Goethe:

“By reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the agonizing drive to propagate the species.  [By reading], his suffering loses a little of its sting.” 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Epicurus on Consumption, Consumerism & What Is (and Isn’t) Required for Happiness

Black Friday.  Mall madness.  Deadly stampedes of Walmart shoppers determined to get half off a Samsung television set.  Black Friday is a carousal of consumption.  Companies flood our inboxes with sales (20% off!  30% off!  50% off!), encouraging us to splurge in the name of “saving” money.  Afraid of missing out on a “once-in-a-lifetime” deal, we buy far more than we actually need.

Why are we so consumed with consumption?

Because we think things will bring us happiness.

In his clever The Consolations of Philosophy, continually charming Alain de Botton uses the wisdom of ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus to refute this deluded, distinctly American notion.  According to Epicurus, only three things are absolutely essential to happiness: thought, freedom and friendship.

Despite the hedonistic associations of his name, Epicurus didn’t support the reckless pursuit of pleasure.  Though he appreciated the finer things in life, he also understood material wealth wasn’t necessary.  To be satisfied, one only needed enough money to provide for the basic requirements of living.

Before you excessively spend this Black Friday, Botton suggests you seriously consider a few questions: could you buy a Chanel bag or an expensive cashmere sweater and still not be happy?  Conversely, could you still experience some measure of satisfaction if you never procured the much-lusted after object?

When you ask yourself these questions, Botton contends, you’ll usually find the worldly objects you crave are not prerequisites for happiness.  If— after years of yearning— you finally acquire a Gucci 1961 Jackie bag, you will still be miserable if you and your husband are constantly fighting.  Similarly, a supremely soft cashmere sweater will offer little consolation if your father just had a heart attack.  You can be just as melancholic on a sun-soaked beach in the Caribbean as you are on a gloomy day in your cramped London apartment.  Lavish things and splendid surroundings do not guarantee contentment.

But why, if material objects cannot promise happiness, do we obsess about their attainment?  Why do we make making money the aim of our existence?

According to Botton, we seek solutions for spiritual problems in material objects.  Rather than organize our heads, we buy Tupperware to organize our cabinets.  Rather than pick up the phone and have a vulnerable conversation with a friend, we treat ourselves to a pair of cat eye sunglasses from Yves Saint Laurent.  Rather than dedicate the time to reflect and identify our life’s purpose, we trade genuine fulfillment for fleeting gratification.  We mindlessly swipe our credit cards for useless junk just to feel the buzz of a dopamine hit and momentarily escape the utter meaninglessness of our existence.  It’s no coincidence that the phrase “retail therapy” has entered our language: in the 21st century, we believe the cure to our psychological ills can be bought on the free market.

In many ways, capitalism depends on us misunderstanding our own needs.  Our most fundamental needs are for love, for friendship, for freedom, for purpose, for meaning.  However, priceless concepts like connection and camaraderie can’t be purchased at Bloomingdales for 20% off on Black Friday.

And therein lies the problem: we cannot buy what we want.

Therefore, companies must trick us into buying their products.  By subliminally appealing to our unconscious needs, they convince us to shop.

When we buy a tube of glamorous red rouge, for instance, we’re buying a promise: to be beautiful and, therefore, loved/admired/heard/seen.

Or say we come across an advertisement that depicts a celebratory scene of attractive 20-somethings clinking champagne glasses in the city.  We subconsciously hear one message: if we drink this particular brand of bubbly, we’ll finally find the companionship we crave.

But we must not believe the lies of advertising.  Love cannot be located in lipstick and friendship cannot be found in a bottle of champagne.  To live well, we must differentiate our real from our invented needs.  We don’t need a Birkin or elegant, extravagant home furnishings.  But we do require a good book and a confidant who listens to us, makes us laugh and helps us not take life too seriously.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Anna Quindlen on Why We Should Write

“Why write?”  I’m tormented by this question nearly every day.  Why bring yourself to your desk, day after day, and try to tame the monsters of your thoughts and pin them to the page?  Why suffer the seemingly unbearable periods of self-hatred and self-doubt if no one cares what we have to say?

In our results-oriented culture, we demand things “pay off.”  Writing a novel is only worthwhile if it becomes a bestseller.  Making a movie is only valuable if it makes us millions of dollars.  Composing a poem is only useful if it gets us somewhere.

The point of creating— we think— is to be seen and heard.  We perform for an audience.  We tap dance for applause.  We write so someone can read our words.

In many ways, we’re motivated by extrinsic rewards.  We write for awards and acclaim, for fame and fortune, for the coveted status of literary icon.  No matter how seemingly superficial, many of us secretly dream of rave reviews in the New York Times, our authorial black-and-white photograph on the back of a book cover.

What do we desire more than anything?

To be respected and esteemed.

If we turn 30 and still have never been published, we may be tempted to give up on our dreams.  We may stay awake late at night chastising ourselves for not choosing a more conventional career.  “Maybe,” we wonder during these midnight terrors, “we should’ve just made our parents proud and become doctors.”

At this moment when we’re most discouraged, we must remember why we write in the first place.  In her clarion call to write, Write for Your Life, populist of the page Anna Quindlen suggests there are far more pressing reasons to put pen to page.  We should write— not for stardom or celebrity— but because the act of writing gives life form and shape.  So much of life is fleeting, transitory.  Unless made solid, our experiences are like grains of sand spilling through a sieve.  Many years from now when we reflect upon our lives, our most cherished memories will be hazy and indistinct.  Writing is a net, a way to catch memory before it flutters away.  

Writing is a means to immortality.  Life is brief, as momentary as the flap of a butterfly’s wing.  Words on a page, however, are long-lasting.  If we have a passing thought, it darts across our consciousness only to forever fade.  But if we record our thoughts— our musings and meditations, our judgements and observations, our daydreams and reveries— they will endure long after we have passed away. 

Recounting a rather mundane moment when she helped a blind woman cross the street, Quindlen writes,

“…and for a few minutes it was nothing but an interior anecdote, passing eventually, as these things do, into memory.

But written down, it lives.  It’s there, it’s real.  That’s the important thing.  That’s why we write things down, to give them life.  Sometimes people ask whether a particularly difficult or challenging situation is made cathartic through writing.  I’m not sure writing about things always makes us feel better, but perhaps it sometimes does make loss, tragedies, disappointments more actual.  It can turn them into somethings with a clear shape and form, and therefore make it possible to see them more deeply and clearly, and more usefully turn confusion and pain into understanding and perhaps reconciliation.  On paper our greatest challenges become A Real Thing, in a world in which so much seems ephemeral and transitory.”

What’s wonderful about books is they connect us with the finest minds from many years ago.  With the turn of a page, a lonesome 21st century reader can find a friend in Tolstoy or Kafka, Hemingway or Fitzgerald.  

In the same way, what we write can speak across continents and centuries to future generations of people.  Though it might seem horribly self-indulgent to write about our own experiences (after all, who cares if our mother died or we just broke up with our boyfriend of 10 years?), we are never just writing for ourselves: what we write inevitably helps others.  Art is an act of service, not an expression of ego.  Writing is a form of connection, a bridge that stretches across the vast distances of time and space and brings together seemingly dissimilar people.   Too often in life, we feel solitary in our struggles.  When we write truthfully about our experiences, we remind our readers that they are not alone.  

Take Anne Frank.  When she wrote in her diary, she probably felt like another teenage girl: obsessing about boys, complaining about her problematic relationship with her mother.  There were probably many mornings when she wondered “why write at all?”  Little did she know that her diary would come to represent the horrors of the Holocaust and resonate with millions around the globe.  Lesson?  We have no idea how our words will impact the world.  As Quindlen notes, 

“That is a kind of afterlife all our own stories, inconsequential and important as well, can assume when we record them.  To write the present is to believe in the future.  One of the poignant things about Anne Frank’s diary is that the very composition suggests that someday she will live to tell it all, and in some sense I suppose she does, on the page, in the attic, surviving day by day, never dreaming that by doing so she will help some of us survive, too.  She’s not really writing the story of the Holocaust, although that’s what she illuminates.  She’s telling the story of one small and unremarkable life that has come to stand for millions of others, and so became remarkable.”

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 · 1 Comment

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.