Life Advice Archives - Page 3 of 10

Places To Go

Some books merit a second life. 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know by Terry Glaspey is one of those books. The original edition was published by Baker Books in 2015. Moody Press recently reissued it with even more pictures than the original.

The concept of the book is simple. Glaspey picked 75 Great Works of Art and wrote up a description of the item and a biography of the artist. Four or five pages per masterpiece. The genres included are visual artwork, music, literature, and film.

The first thing you notice is, of course, the table of contents and which 75 works made the cut. The most noticeable thing is what is not in this list. There is no theology, biography, or devotional classics. Indeed, the most surprising thing is that if you made a list of the things you would expect to show up in a Reddit forum on things every Christian should read, it would look nothing like this list.

Instead Glaspey’s list is quite intriguing. While I could come up with a short list of works Glaspey doesn’t have which I would have put onto my own list of 75 masterpieces every Christian should know, I can’t point to anything on Glaspey’s list which is lacking enough merit to be in the conversation. (Wodehouse is the most painful omission; every Christian should read Wodehouse to learn more about the joy of life. So should every non-Christian, for that matter.) This isn’t the definitive list of 75 masterpieces, but it would be fair to say that you won’t go wrong if you started with this 75.

The real danger in a book like this is that once you get past having fun looking at the table of contents, it is all downhill. The genuinely pleasant surprise in this book is that the book gets even better once you get to the Book Proper. You can read this book straight through or you can pick it up in an idle moment and read a few pages a random, or you could grab it when you want to think about a new topic or are looking for a book or movie recommendation. It doesn’t really matter how you read or use this book, you won’t be disappointed.

The intriguing thing about the items in this book is that they are not all narrowly Christian devotional works. These are not all things for sale at your local Christian Bookstore. The artists are not even all conventional devout Christians. There is a host of flawed individuals and people who struggled mightily with Faith. But, in every case the art itself has something transcendent about it, something that causes it to rise up to being something it which any Christian would benefit from spending time.

Glaspey hints at the general idea of his selections in many places. Here he is in the middle of discussing George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin and other fairy tales:

They are meat to show us truths that do not easily reduce to rational explanations and provoke a more intuitive response from the reader. There are layers of meanings at work here, all of them valid: physical, spiritual, mythical, and psychological. Each of these layers interpenetrate and illuminate each other, which is why these stories are not so much meant to illustrate theological truths as to help us find our way into a different way of experiencing these truths.

Just so. That description would apply equally well to Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison or Frank Capra’s It’s Wonderful Life or Makoto Fujimura’s The Four Holy Gospels (all of which are included in this volume). These are not works akin to verse by verse commentaries or the stereotypical study guide to the Bible. These are not works akin to the self-help books The Christian Way to Deal with Problem X. These are all masterpieces, works designed for rumination. Glaspey points to the work, gives just enough background to make you want to take up the work, and then set you off to discover whatever you will discover.

For the works I know well, Glaspey is a sure guide. He is not afraid to include works that really push the margins of conventional Christian thought, and for that alone, I have enormous respect for what he has done. Taking just some literary works: Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, O’Connor’s Collected Stories,Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Dickinson’s Complete Poems—none of those are things which would be on a standard list of Christian Masterpieces, but Glaspey is right that they all belong on a list of Masterpieces a Christian should know.

It would be easy to just go on listing insights I picked up here and there, works with which I now want to spend some time and get to know or to know better, things that suddenly look different. But, I’ll close with the thing that I found most stunning.

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the 1964 jazz album. I started listening to this album a decade or so ago. It is truly an amazing bit of music. Sets a wonderful mood; truly meditative and a bit hypnotic. I liked it. But, I was shocked to see it in a list of 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know. The only vocals in it are a brief point where the musicians all start chanting “A Love Supreme” for a bit; it blends in nicely with the rest of the music, but it isn’t a really big part of the album. So, what is this album doing on this list? As Glaspey describes the album, he starts talking about a poem John Coltrane wrote and put in the liner notes on the album cover. Aha! I listened to the electronic version of the album; I had never seen the album cover. But, then came the real shock The Fourth Movement of A Love Supreme is filled with a haunting saxophone. The saxophone part maps perfectly onto the poem. Coltrane was literally playing the words of the poem on the saxophone. You can find the part on YouTube with words being shown as the saxophone plays. It is extraordinary. The album went from good to transcendent. How transcendent?…well, it became the music I put on while driving to church on Easter.

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)

Yea, Faith Without a Hope

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and love and the hope are all in the waiting.

That is T. S. Eliot in “East Coker.” The trio of faith, hope, and love is straight out of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church. The oddity or intriguing thing about the way Eliot uses that trio is the idea of having one without the others. With no hope and no love, how does faith persist?

G. K. Chesterton’s epic poem The Ballad of the White Horse is a marvelous illustration of the idea in Eliot’s poem. Indeed, once I saw this, I pulled the annotated Eliot off my shelf, fully expecting to see this ballad listed among the sources for “East Coker;” but Chesterton was not mentioned at all. (Oddly, neither was 1 Corinthians.) Did Eliot read Chesterton? I have no idea, but it sure seems like he would have.

The Ballad of the White Horse tells the tale of the 9^th century Saxon King Alfred who beats back the Danish Vikings occupying England. The great battle took place at Ethandune, where a large chalk horse is carved into a nearby hill, hence the White Horse. Alfred’s accomplishments earned him the sobriquet Alfred the Great. This poem was obviously Chesterton’s attempt to write a modern day Iliad. If you like tales of great warriors on both sides of a battle slaying each other while making grand speeches, then you’ll like this poem.

But as fun as it is to read verse describing how a great sword was hurled through the air to strike an opponent over the eye, that wasn’t the part that caused me to spend time in deep reverie. The story opens with Alfred wandering through a wood musing upon the Vikings occupying the land when he suddenly encounters the Virgin Mary.

“Mother of God,” the wanderer said,
“I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing.

“The gates of heaven are fearful gates,
Worse than the gates of hell;
Not I would break the splendours barred,
Or seek to know the thing they guard,
Which is too good to tell.

“But for this earth most pitiful,
This little land I know,
If that which is forever is,
Or if our hearts shall break with bliss,
Seeing the stranger go?

A promising beginning to a tale. If you ran into the Virgin Mary one day, you might well ask if Dante described heaven accurately or something like that. But, Alfred just wants to know if the Vikings will be forever occupying the land (“if that which is forever is”) or if they will one day leave.

With the aid of hindsight, we know what answer Mary should have given; obviously the Vikings leave and we know that Alfred plays a big role in their departure. So, Mary’s reply is a bit shocking:

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.

“Night shall be thrice night over you,
And heaven an iron cope.
Do you have joy without a cause,
Yea, faith without a hope?”

Joy without cause I get. But faith without a hope? If you know you will lose, if you have no hope of winning, how do you maintain faith? What does it look like to have faith with no hope? Faith in what exactly?

The shape of faith without hope becomes clear as the story unfolds. Alfred has no hope of beating back the Vikings, but that does not stop him from gathering the chiefs of the land. He then finds his way into the Danish camp pretending to be a wandering minstrel. On his way out of camp, he taunts them thus:

“That though we scatter and though we fly
And you hang over us like the sky
You are more tired of victory,
Than we are tired of shame.

“That though you hunt the Christian man
Like a hare in the hill-side,
The hare has still more heart to run
Than you have heart to ride.

“That though all lances split on you,
All swords be heaved in vain,
We have more lust again to lose
Than you to win again.

That is exactly what faith without hope looks like. Tired of shame; heart to keep running; lust to lose again. Alfred keeps going not because he has a hope of winning the war. Alfred keeps going because he has total faith that this is what he is supposed to do. He does it knowing the sky will grow darker yet and the sea will rise ever higher. He will lose. Then lose again. And the lust to lose one more time will not diminish.

That is faith. Pure unadulterated faith.

Wise he had been before defeat,
And wise before success;
Wise in both hours, and ignorant,
Knowing neither more nor less.

We often think of a test of faith as a time when hope flickers yet we maintain our hope because we have faith. Faith, in other words, is often described as a hope-generating mechanism. Times are tough, but have faith, they will get better. That phrasing though blurs the distinction between faith and hope. Instead: times are tough, but have faith even though they will not get better. That is the real test of faith. Keep going even though you will lose because you have faith that this is exactly what you are supposed to do.

With the constant tales of victory over long odds, we build a culture of hope. Hope is a good thing; it is a theological virtue. Faith can aid in the building of hope; hope can strengthen faith. It is an easy thing to imagine hope without faith. To maintain hope when faith is dead is hard, but we encourage people to do so nonetheless. Flipping the order is equally important. To truly learn the nature of faith, it must be contemplated in the absence of hope. Sometimes in life, faith needs to be practiced in the absence of hope.

Faith, hope, and love. When all else fades, these three remain. They are all in the waiting, in the stillness, in the quiet whispers of God.

C. S. Lewis and the Reading Life

“If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.”

“A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.”

C.S. Lewis

The hobby of reading has a curious feature. All hobbies have books written to explain how to more fully enjoy the hobby. But reading is the only hobby where the act of reading about the hobby is the same as the hobby itself. Hence books about reading are quite common. Indeed, as you read more and more, it is hard to avoid reading books by enthusiasts for your hobby.

C.S. Lewis has become an Institution. In many Christian circles, he is the theologian for people who don’t really want to read theology. He is a genial writer, making deeply substantive points in a winsome manner. You can read Lewis quickly for the joy of his prose and the flashes of insight littering the book. You can read Lewis slowly, taking apart his arguments in detail and trying to fill in the gaps. He has fiction and non-fiction, both dense and light, but always written in a prose which just carries the reader along. People find Lewis in all sorts of ways—through Narnia or science fiction or Screwtape or grief or The Abolition of Man. Once you find him, you notice you find him everywhere.

Couple the last two paragraphs together and you have an obvious book, indeed one it is a wonder is only being published now. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, C. S. Lewis’ The Reading Life is a collection of excerpts about reading which are scattered among Lewis’ voluminous output. If you like Lewis and if you enjoy reading, you have already clicked the link above to buy the book. It is an irresistible title.

But, is the book any good? (Is it heretical to even ask if a book of Lewis’ writings is good? In some circles, yes.) It is, as you might expect if you are not in the Church of Lewis, a mixed bag. There are some really great essays in here and some fun short excerpts. But there is not enough to fill a whole book. It isn’t hard to see why. Lewis actually has a whole book on reading which explains his ideas at length. An Experiment in Criticism is rather good; I’ve used it in reading groups as a way to kick off the discussions. But, given that Lewis published his fully developed thoughts on reading in a book of their own, is there enough left over in the rest of Lewis’ corpus for a full anthology?

The present anthology kicks off with a couple of excerpts from An Experiment in Criticism, which would be hard to avoid. Then we move to a bunch of hits and pieces from elsewhere, some gems, some obvious filler. Lots of blank space and pages with the super large fancy italicized font of an excerpt from the excerpt you are reading. The real market for this book is when you need a gift for a friend who likes reading. The format and contents of this book scream “Present for the Reader in Your Life.” Not a bad gift, by the way.

What about the content? Lewis makes a distinction between True Readers and people who happen to read. “How to Know if You are a True Reader” is the title of the second selection. It is a four part test:

1. Loves to re-read books
2. Highly values reading as an activity (versus as a last resort)
3. Lists the reading of particular books as a life-changing experience
4. Continuously reflects and recalls what one has read

If you hit on all four, congratulations, you are a True Reader (but you already knew that). If not, well, it’s not too late to join our cult.

And yes, the Cult of Readers is a real thing. As Lewis notes:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

It is often difficult to explain the pleasure of reading to those not as enamored with it. For many, maybe even most, people, reading is a chore. It is something you do to learn something. This is even true of reading fiction; many people read fiction as if they are accomplishing the chore of learning the plot. I suspect this is why many book clubs fail; if reading is a chore and you are reading a book purely for the task of going to your book club, there is something lacking in the experience. Sure, getting together with your friends is fun, but if reading the book was a chore for everyone involved, it is no wonder the conversation feels stilted.

For Lewis’ True Reader, the act of reading is not a chore you do in order to accomplish another end. One reads because in doing so, one is catapulted into a pleasure that is literally unattainable in any other way. Perhaps it is best explained by noting that the way to attain the pleasure of reading is to realize that reading is not a serious hobby. It is a light-hearted and fun hobby.

For a great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be used, and all our criticism of it will be pure illusion. For you cannot judge any artifact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs. Much bad criticism, indeed, results from the efforts of critics to get a work-time result out of something that never aimed at producing more than pleasure.

This is not just true of schlocky genre fiction, by the way. Dickens also should be read with your feet on the fender. So should Plato. For those for whom reading is a hobby, the whole point of reading Thucydides or Chekhov is simply that it is fun to go along for the ride. Imagine starting Ivanhoe or Middlemarch in exactly the same relaxed mode you had when you picked up Good Omens or Harry Potter. If you can do that, you are a True Reader.

Books are not death marches. “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely then they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.” I acutely suffer from this failing, by the way. I have pushed my way through far too many books I knew I should have abandoned. I blame Moby Dick. I forced myself through an endless amount of whaling trivia, wondering why I was reading all this, only to find that it all came to a magnificent end in which all that lore was suddenly necessary to appreciate the epic clash at the end of the book. Ever since then, I have pushed through many a book, thinking, “Maybe this is like Moby Dick.” Decades later, I have no other examples of when not skipping was worth it.

If you want to cultivate the hobby of reading, how do you do it? It’s remarkably simple. Find a book you really want to read, put up your feet, and start reading. The trick is not to wonder if you have picked the right book. If you enjoy it, it is the right book.

After a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
The child whose love is here, at least death reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

When you forget yourself in a book, you know the feeling. Then start another book and forget yourself again. When you do this, you’ll notice something else wonderful; there are other bookish people around you. “When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else—even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.”

Why do I have a blog? Why do I send out a newsletter? There is nothing so nice as discussing books with someone else.

Lost in Thought

It is always nice to talk about a book which has been getting universal over-the-top praise and which actually merits that praise. If the discussion below does not convince you to read this book, chalk it up to the failure of Your Humble Narrator and not the book. You, Dear Reader, want to read this book.

But first, what seems like a digression. “What did you think about the book? What was good about it? Bad about it?” Every time I am teaching a Great Books class or having a discussion with a reading group, that is always the first question I ask. It is the single most important question I ask in any discussion, not because all by itself it generates the best and most thoughtful answers, but because it centers the discussion exactly where it belongs. A person reads a book, and the single most important thing about that interaction is the effect the book has on the Reader.

The best reason to read books, particularly Great Books, is because they force us to confront our own thoughts, to think about what we believe, and to wrestle with the unanswerable questions. We become deeper, more fully human, as our interior life develops book by book. Yes, we can read books for information, we can read them to know what other people said, we can study them to do well on a test or a paper, but all of those purposes for reading a book get in the way of discovering the most important thing in a book. There is simply no pleasure like developing your own thoughts on the questions which matter most by letting your mind wander over the best that has been thought and said.

Convincing people that cultivating the joy of learning should be the real aim of education in an uphill battle. Most people think of education as something with a tangible purpose, usually related to employment. Class by class, book by book, indeed blog post by blog post, I wage my cheerful battle, constantly exclaiming: Look! This book is really amazing!

You can thus imagine my joy in reading Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. It is a wonderful book containing in its depths a new way to make the case for the type of education that matters most, the type of education that is not contained in a college classroom.

Stylistically, the book is marvelous; Hitz’s prose has an erudite charm, patiently inviting the Reader to join her in developing an intellectual life. Imagine a bookish dinner-table conversation full of wit and insight, and you are imagining having Hitz at the table.

Hitz begins by noting that much learning is done for instrumental purposes, “fame, prestige, fortune, and social use.” Those purposes are nice and all, but if you are learning to achieve any of those things, you miss the joy of an intellectual life. The other type of learning is purely for its own sake. It is not a means to an end; it is the end. Convincing people to learn for instrumental purposes is easy. Pay $70,000/year for four years, get a diploma, and then get that job with that nice salary. Convincing people to learn purely for the sake of learning, to read books purely for the joy of reading books, to think thoughts purely because it is pleasurable to do so…that is the harder task.

For the most part, the modern college is of little help in teaching the pleasures of learning for its own sake. As Hitz notes:

If intellectual life essentially involves a reaching out past the surface, a questioning of appearances, a longing for more than is evident, then it has next to nothing to do with what is commonly called “knowledge”—the absorption of correct opinions. And yet correct opinions are what our contemporary intellectual institutions traffic in: the correct opinions about literature, or history, or science, or mathematics. Hence the universality of the bullet point, delivered in a college lecture, whose temporary memorization is the condition for the above-average grade. Hence too the administrative emphasis on learning outcomes; hence the politicization of everything, the reduction of learning to its social and political results.

Colleges have a hard time escaping this trap. Even when they realize they have replaced learning with propaganda, they end up advocating more “viewpoint diversity,” which as Hitz astutely notes is “nearly as superficial and dehumanizing as the forms of indoctrination it means to replace.” Now instead of memorizing one viewpoint to be repeated on an exam, a student memorizes two or three viewpoints to be repeated on an exam, and students have no trouble figuring out which of the options is the correct one.

Learning for its own sake is much more difficult. Learning for its own sake involves removing all the exterior noise which wants to interrupt as we read and think. The exterior noise is easier to eliminate, though, than the interior noise.

Intellectual life turns out to be a sort of asceticism, a turning away from the things within ourselves. Our desires for truth, for understanding, for insight are in constant conflict with other desires: our desires for social acceptance or an easy life, a particular personal goal or a desirable political outcome….“The world” that we sought initially to escape turns out to be in us, part of our inbuilt motivations—not outside us. To exercise love of learning is to flee what is worst in us for the sake of the better, to reach for more in the face of what is not enough.

The fact that developing an intellectual life is hard is one of the reasons it is difficult to persuade people it is worth doing. We are surrounded by things designed to give immediate gratification. The constant hit of dopamine from (pick your favorite pastime) is a difficult thing to set aside for a while in order to ponder the nature of revenge or whether it was possible for the world to have never existed or what restrictions on liberty increase the common good. Asking yourself who you are and whether you have a purpose never quite seems as attractive as that thing you need to do to gain social acceptance or a pay raise or to relax at the end of the day.

This is where Hitz’s book achieves it greatness. The picture it paints of the intellectual life is sublime.

What good is intellectual life? It is a refuge from distress; a reminder of one’s dignity; a source of insight and understanding; a garden in which human aspiration is cultivated; a hollow of a wall to which one can temporarily withdraw from the current controversies to gain a broader perspective to remind oneself of one’s universal human heritage. All this makes clear at the least that it is an essential good for human beings, even if one good among many.

Why does an intellectual life bring these benefits? Why does reading Great Books, reading Dickens or Tolstoy or James, and pondering them purely for the joy of doing so enhance our lives? Why is this joy different from all other joys? Why is developing an intellectual life better than watching gladiator matches or spending time on social media? “Because reality has a better chance to break through.”

Reality breaking through is an intriguing formulation. One of the most common objections I hear from students about why instrumental learning is better than learning for its own sake is the need to live in the world rather than in some lofty tower of thought. Learning how to price municipal bonds seems much more important than asking whether charging interest is inherently a form of theft which leads to figuring out the nature of property and why it exists as a concept which leads to the question of what brings human happiness. Which of those questions is “real”? Which of those questions really matters? Bond pricing formulas are easy to learn and knowing them can bring tangible financial benefits. Pondering the relationship of property to human well-being? That is a question that really matters.

Hitz ends the book wrestling with a question that has obviously troubled her for years. Is it morally acceptable to discover the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life and then live a life simply enjoying those pleasures? Isn’t such a life inherently self-centered? Shouldn’t we be living our lives to help others?

Hitz makes a stab at an answer which clearly doesn’t entirely satisfy her. (By the way, another one of the marvelous things about this book is that Hitz puts her own unanswered questions on display. It is so refreshing to see an author acknowledge that the book you are reading does not solve all of life’s mysteries.) If you want to help others, Hitz argues, you can better do so if you have discovered the intellectual life. The argument is subtle, to be sure, but learning in order to help others is instrumental and misses the real value of learning. Learning for its own sake allows you to see reality, to see the things that really matter. Having seen those things, you will be in a much better place to help others. The tricky thing if you want to help others is approaching the intellectual life for its own sake and not simply for the sake of this other goal of helping others.

I think Hitz’s argument here is right as far as it goes, but because this is the question that troubles her so much, she misses the real force of her own argument. Imagine somebody taking Hitz seriously and developing an intellectual life by reading Great Books and thinking long and hard about deep questions. Over time, reality breaks through and this person discovers answers to deep questions and leads a satisfying intellectual life. What will this person do then? Isn’t it obvious that the answer is “Well it depends on the person and the answers that person found to deep questions”?

One treat which is remarkably obvious to all those who have found the hidden pleasures of the intellectual life is that there is not a one size fits all answer to how life should be led. Indeed, it is one of the joys of an intellectual life that all answers are provisional, that the questions never stop. Does an intellectual life lead to a conviction that helping others is important? Obviously, for some people it does lead to that conclusion. Those people, having thought deeply, seeing reality, will then launch out on a lifetime of helping others, not because they started with believing that this is something that would bring acclaim or assuage guilt, but because having tasted the depths of their own humanity, they realize that helping others is the activity an intellectual should do. Will everyone discover this? Maybe not. Doesn’t the fact that we might come to different answers increase the joy of the intellectual journey?

Hitz did not need to be concerned that her argument does not prove that the intellectual life necessarily leads to a life of service to others. Hitz’s life provides the argument that some people will indeed find that answer. Hitz wants to lead a life in service to others, she uncovers the joy of the intellectual life, and the result is a book which provides a magnificent service to others. Everyone who reads this book and is persuaded to take just one more step along this journey owes her a debt of gratitude.

How to Write The Grapes of Wrath

“It is my observation as an editor that most beginning authors are attracted to the trade of letters, not because they have anything apposite and exigent to say, but simply because it seems easy.”

That is the start of H. L. Mencken’s essay “Authorship as a Trade” (reprinted in Prejudices: Fifth Series).

I have been teaching for over a quarter of a century now. What has been the hardest thing to teach students? Not even a contest. I have never figured out how to convince students that writing well is hard work.

I can’t fault the students too much; I didn’t discover that writing well was hard work until after I graduated from college. My economics professor Tom Mayer did his best to teach me this, but I did not absorb the lesson. I remember my shock in class one day when he asked students to raise a hand if they ever struggled trying to find the right word to use in a sentence. One or two students raised their hands. I was not one of them. He then said, “Those of you who raised your hand might be good writers. The rest of you are not.” Truth be told, I was a bit indignant.

What Eliot called the intolerable wrestle with words and meaning is a real thing if you want to write well. There is a myth that some people are just naturally gifted prose stylists, that ever since they were born they have this supernatural ability to sit down and observe impeccable prose pouring forth. Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath (edited by Robert DeMott) is a marvelous demonstration that writing is hard even for good writers.

When Steinbeck set out to write The Grapes of Wrath, he started a daily journal in which he would record how he was feeling at the outset of every day. It is a remarkable view of the craft of writing. Four and a half months into the process, Steinbeck, acknowledging that he is going to have to revisit the work of the last several months to fix words and tone, exclaims, “Sorry, but I could hardly be expected to whip out finished copy.” Remember, this is a diary—he is apologizing to himself.

The diary has one recurrent theme: Despair.

“I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.”
“This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy.”
“Maybe I was silly to think I could write such a long book without stopping. I can’t. Or rather I couldn’t. I’ll try to go on now.”
“I’m getting worried about this book. I wish it were done. I’m afraid I’m botching it. I think it would be a good thing to stop and think about it but I hate to lose the time. But I want it to be good and I’m afraid it is slipping. But I must remember that it always seems that way when it is well along.”
“…I am sure of one thing—it isn’t the great book I had hoped I would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do.”

This awful run-of-the-mill book, botched by an inadequate failure of a writer, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and was a large part of why Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize. Yet, in writing it, Steinbeck was unrelentingly in a state of despair at his failures as a writer. As Tom Mayer noted, that is the mark of someone who might be a good writer.

How did Steinbeck manage to write the novel despite his constant sense that he was failing? That is the other theme which runs throughout the diary: Discipline.

“The failure of will for even one day has a devastating effect on the whole, far more important than just the loss of time and wordage. The whole physical basis of the novel is discipline of the writer, of his material, of the language. And sadly enough, if any of the discipline is gone, all of it suffers.”
“But I’ve got to go on and think of nothing but this book. I’m behind now and I want not to lose any more time, and so I simply must go on. It’s good to work even if the absolute drive isn’t in you.”
“…I must reestablish the discipline. Must get tough.”
“My work is no good, I think—I’m desperately upset about it. Have no discipline any more. I must get back.”
“I have been remiss and lazy, my concentration I have permitted to go under the line of effort….My job is to get down to it and now. For all the pressures, there is only one person to blame and I must force him into it.”

Putting it together, writing well is an act of seeming futility which breeds despair. The only way to write well is to endure that despair by sheer will and discipline. Just keep writing. Write bad sentences and bad paragraphs. Then wrote some more bad paragraphs and bad sentences. And bit by bit, some of those sentences will become better sentences and some of those paragraphs will become better paragraphs. Writing is a craft that must be learned by work. Hard work.

Why did I not learn this lesson in school? Why did I get through high school and college writing essays which earned good grades? Looking back on them now makes me wince. Why did nobody ever tell me that if I wanted to write well, I needed to spend way more time working on the craft of writing? Where did the myth start that it was possible to whip out a nice essay with no struggle over words and meaning, with no search for the perfect word?

John Steinbeck obviously writes better prose than most mortals. But, as this diary makes perfectly clear, the reason he could do that is because he worked at it, he struggled with it. Day after day.

The trouble with being too casual about a manuscript is that you don’t do it. In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, “I’ll do it if I feel like it.” One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not. And I am a little afraid that they are not much good. However down they go. The forced work is sometimes better than the easy, but there is no rule about it. Sometimes they come out better than at other times and that is all one can say.

That is indeed all one can say. If you want to learn to write well, there is no substitute for the discipline of writing. However, there is another barrier, I suspect a rather common barrier. In order to learn to write well, one must first be convinced that writing well is important. Not merely important to get a good grade, but important in and of itself. That was another lesson I never learned in school.

Adam Smith Wants You to Enjoy the Holidays

“How to cope without typical holiday traditions this year—and even start some new ones” blares the headline at CBS news. “How Will Your Favorite Holiday Traditions Fare This Year? Tell Us About It” asks NPR. “Rethinking the Holidays: Traditions, Change Are on the Table” asserts US News. “New Holiday Traditions for 2020” is the headline at American Lifestyle, which somehow missed the fact that “new tradition” is rather oxymoronic.

Faced with a steady stream of headlines like that, you, like most people, might get rather depressed. Christmas is coming and the goose is getting…dropped from the menu. Multiply that by all those things you used to do and will not be doing this year, and it all seems rather bleak. But, why? Why aren’t you excited that your forthcoming celebrations are going to be novel and different?

Read the Rest at Adam Smith Works