The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, starting in the dark of the mind, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have, and its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never be alone. Our very medium is held in common, the language we are born into (or adopt—Conrad, Nabokov, Aleksandar Hemon from their Slavic languages into English; Milan Kundera from Czech to French; most recently Jhumpa Lahiri from English to Italian).

  Language is a shared resource, not individual, not unique, not self-made. We are crowded on all sides with words we hold in common, words that mean the same thing to all of us. We get huffy about grammar, we fight over usage. Language is not, like paint, a medium. It is a system. Another system—the Ladies with theirs, Gregor Mendel quietly seeking the inner system of generation, the monks spinning the wheel of the cycle of Psalms. Language is the ultimate system. We all use those same twenty-six letters. This is why Gutenberg’s invention of movable type works at all.

  It is also why people will blithely say to a writer who has spent six or eight years sweating out a work of fiction, “You know, if I had the time, I’d write a novel too.” Not something a music lover is likely to tell a composer—“If I had the time, I’d write a symphony.” We know we all own this thing, this habit of naming, expressing, connecting the narrative dots. The jabber that is our human signifier. I can talk, therefore I can write. If I had the time. If I bothered. In spite of everything I know about how hard it is to write, I can’t say I really have an argument against that presumption. You could write this book—if you had the time. If you even cared to. I find it hard to disbelieve this.

  But the paradox of a writer’s relation to being alone, and specifically being alone with words, is even deeper than the fact that writing is communication. A writer is aware not only of her own voice humming along, but hears with the ear of that mysterious other, the elusive reader for whom the sentences are laid out. Writers are always—always—in relationship. We write to—for—the reader. Which is more confounding, really, than having, as actors do, an audience that is a distanced and objectified congregated other.

  Writers are caught—how else to put this?—in an embrace. They—we, I—cannot escape from communicating. Even so-called (and self-defined) experimental writers who appear not to care about the reader or even disdain him, underscore, even more powerfully in their refusal to play nicely with others, the frustrations of the chaotic self in its struggle with that most shared and social of materials—language. “Yes,” Samuel Beckett, Mr. Minimal, said of his work, “in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of.”

  My life—since we must call it so. Beckett would really rather not have his three attributes gathered into anything as repellently autobiographical as “my life.” Yet there it is—a writer is composed, perhaps of equal parts, of silence, articulation, and isolation. That’s the job. That’s the life.

  We do not, in the act of composition, have an audience. We have a reader. The writer is the mouth, the reader the ear. The body is language and it is shared. We write to a singular other whom we must allure, embrace, enchant. We are whispering into that singular shell-shaped ear. This is probably inevitable, for our first literary experience is not as a writer, but as a reader. We read as individuals, and as writers we write not for readers in a collective sense, but for what earlier generations frankly called the “dear reader.” It’s a crazy love affair, this murmuring into the ear of the elusive yet intimate mystery person. Being so intimate, of course it has to be done in private, in the solitude of the lonely mind.

  True, there is a performance aspect to it all. We give readings, separating the private act of composition from the act of sharing the work—but that is after the act of composition is over and done, rather like trotting out your precocious five-year-old to the audience, never thinking to present the act of conception to the crowd. When you give a reading in a large full hall, a genuine theater, the audience is entirely in the dark, you the solo spotlighted figure. You can’t see them, and they’re very quiet out there. You might even jump to hear that weird beast let out its communal ha-ha at something funny you’ve read to them, to it. You are so alone up there, you forget they have been gathered into an audience. Nothing could be further from the dear reader you were writing to in your room.

  In the act of writing, the writer is never really alone, even though being alone is the one thing we recognize as our chance for authenticity, for surprising ourselves out of predictability. For thinking. Even writing a diary, Virginia Woolf cannily noted, is not the act of solitude it might seem—we all like to look good to ourselves, even in that privacy. We are our own dear reader.

  * * *

  —

  Solitude provides the illusion—or is it the reality?—of a self. If I’m alone I can think dark thoughts, be real, be phony, try this, try that. Erase, contradict, forge ahead, double back. We all contain multitudes, not just Whitman, not just Montaigne, that master of contradiction.

  The longing for solitude is a deeply romantic passion. But then writing is a romantic thing to do, predicated on desire, urgency, and an ideal of human connection, hardly available in what we wistfully call real life. Maybe especially when we are not living alone, when circumstances deny privacy, not to mention solitude, when we are very much in the midst of the demands of family or job—whatever it is that outlaws solitude—perhaps it is especially then we are most in love with what solitude seems to provide, what it promises. It promises freedom.

  To be alone is to be free—who said that? It’s an idea floating around, said by many. But I’m thinking of Julian Barnes, in Levels of Life, his memoir of his wife’s untimely death from a brain tumor. He quotes a widowed friend who admits that even in her terrible grief she also realizes she is free. Free of what? Free for what?

  In his book Barnes performs what might be called a tour of bereavement—that is, enforced solitude. He does not feel free, as his widowed friend admits to feeling. Wisely, he does not see her admission as the absence of grief, but as an aspect of her particular grief. Grief is the unbearable inverse of resonant solitude; it is solitary confinement, now recognized by the human rights commission as torture. Barnes says he cannot be in crowds—they remind him of his isolation. Or Mary Shelley’s response to her husband’s death: Solitude was my only consolation—deep, dark, deathlike solitude. Or as a recently widowed neighbor of mine said, sheepishly, I just want to stay in my hidey-hole.

  To be denied the beloved, it turns out, is to be denied oneself. I love living with you. It’s like being alone. That is the radiant paradox of aloneness/connection that a writer (forget “a writer”—a person) must find within, whether beset with children, with the care of elderly withering parents, stuck with a hopeless spouse, with a soul-sapping job, or just burdened with a killer to-do list. We must learn to be alone in the midst of whatever denies us useful solitude. We must make up solitude where it does not exist.

  Here you are again, coming to my aid, proving once again the reader, not the writer, has the keenest bead on the work. This time it is the voice of a dying man. We were visiting—death didn’t come into it, you weren’t expected to die. Not yet. Sometime, but not anytime soon. You’re only a dying man in retrospect.

  You liked to sit in the kitchen. That’s where we were. You said you’d like a cup of coffee, and would I make it strong, please. With my back turned from you to your much-prized coffeemaker, you said, apropos of nothing, in a voice not personal, but decisive, quiet, calm: You must always keep a part of your mind entirely to yourself.

  You weren’t speaking generally, saying “one” should do this. You spoke directly to me, to the back of my head as if to the base of my existence. The voice of an oracle, a message like the one at the core of Western civiliza
tion—Know thyself. You repeated it, as if it had to be posted twice: You must always keep a part of your mind entirely to yourself.

  Said mere days before your unexpected death. An odd, disconnected remark. Not part of the conversation we were having—we were talking about the dog who stood between us, and seemed to be listening. You were speaking of the absolute requirement of solitude not outside oneself as I had been “on retreat” in California. This was the solitude within the mind. This is integrity.

  I was measuring the coffee into the coffeemaker. I didn’t turn around. I don’t think you would have said it if I’d been facing you. You had to speak to the back of my head. It wasn’t something to talk about across the yellow table. An oracle is like that, distant, implacable, penetrating. I added the water, listened to the thing bubbling.

  I understood you were saying something essential, even though it was off-the-cuff. You were speaking—how strange I didn’t realize it then—from a position almost on the other side of this surface we call life. Maybe I did sense that. Solitude itself was speaking to me.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve come upon yet another example of solitude from Virginia Woolf, that writing virago who went from novels to essays to diary, on to letters, cycling back into fiction and nonfiction, an endless round of sentences for something like forty years. It sometimes seems, wearyingly, that she said just about everything a person could say about the life of the mind.

  She was aware that she and her contemporaries at the dawn of what we call modernism were breaking with narrative tradition at some cost. She says about this new kind of writing that describes not the surface of action but the pulse of thought, “I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time. Probably all writers now are in the same boat. It is the penalty we pay for breaking with tradition, and the solitude makes the writing more exciting.” Perhaps inevitably, she latches on to our word—solitude. It is an oddly personal word to describe the “penalty” of “breaking with tradition.” She is describing a cultural separation, but one she experiences in bruising personal terms. And notice—“the solitude makes the writing more exciting.”

  Woolf was fretting—also preening—that this “new” narration of inner consciousness (her task, her “break with tradition”) was something quite different, more coolly detached than “writing her life.” To write her mind she was entering a solitude not romantic, but planetary. It was not autobiographical. She makes clear that this solitude is not about delving into the self. She even suggests a practical method to attain this solitude.

  The first step, she says, is “gentle exercise in the air.” This is not a metaphor. She means—go for a walk. Walk, let the world and the elements have at you. “Second, the reading of good literature. It is a mistake,” she says, “to think that literature can be produced from the raw.” That is, from the solo self, from “inside.” Solitude is not a matter of consciously searching for originality of the unique “self.” The opposite. The first step is physical exercise, the second is reading. Not writing, but reading. Getting into somebody else’s head.

  Curiously, the purpose she finds in solitude—or perhaps its lesson—is not to be alone with oneself. Solitude is not about discovering one’s genius, one’s misery or glory, one’s anything. Not even one’s life, Beckett’s “my life, since we must call it so.” Rather, she says in this diary entry, “one must become externalized; very, very concentrated . . . , not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain.”

  Get over yourself, in other words. This isn’t about you. See yourself not as a source, not even as a subject, but as an instrument. Montaigne’s discovery in the Essais. This liberation from the ego is the purpose of solitude, to hone the blade of the self to cut into reality, to bring a jagged piece of it back. A shard. Don’t expect to get the whole thing, the grail called “form.” You get maybe a shard. Put it in your pocket. Keep walking in the open air.

  It sounds lonely. But there is nothing to be afraid of here, apparently. “The cure for loneliness,” Marianne Moore advised, “is solitude.” What she is saying in her gnomic way is that loneliness is self-regarding, while solitude is world-regarding. Loneliness eats away at you. Solitude fills and fills you.

  The testimony of contemplatives makes this clear, hermits and cloistered nuns and monks who “leave the world,” in order to think of and pray about nothing else but the world and its suffering. A failed monk is a monk trying to save himself. The point of solitude for these professional solitaries is not to save their souls, but to take on the reality of the world. That reality—I’m only reporting here, see Buddha, see John of the Cross, see Simone Weil—displays the fundamental facts of affliction and beauty. Both. The poles of existence. The thorn and the rose. To do this work, as the dying man told me, asking me to refill his coffee—you liked it black in the little white mug—is that a part of the mind must be kept separate. Be still, and know that I am God, as the Psalmist says of the apprehension of reality.

  * * *

  —

  Then there is Blaise Pascal with his lemon-sucking aphorism, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Really? If we’re going to think about sitting quietly in a room alone, I’d rather think about Emily Dickinson, the white dresses, the upright house with the fence around it, the dense dark cakes given to neighbors, tiny poems in her spider hand on the bits of paper and the backs of envelopes, the snatches of reality she managed to cadge like crickets chirping in bamboo boxes. She took on the subject of solitude too, understanding it as cosmic, not personal, though to know and express that fact you have to become remote yourself, like a moon, cold and distant upon which reality is reflected. You have to keep part of your mind to yourself, separate, as you said, hands around your hot coffee mug. She figured out how to do that. This is her solitude poem:

  HERE is a solitude of space,

  A solitude of sea,

  A solitude of death, but these

  Society shall be,

  Compared with that profounder site,

  That polar privacy,

  A Soul admitted to Itself:

  Finite Infinity.

  There’s a woman who has sat in her room alone—and only allowed words in as her company. It’s a much bigger condition than avoiding the troubles of the world. It is more like braving the troubles, shouldering them. Take a walk, in the open air, Pascal.

  Thinking so long about solitude, I have arrived at poetry, of course, because poetry sets the campfire for solitude. My first love, and yours too—poems. The telltale shelves of the narrow paperbacks of contemporary poets that first day when you invited me in for a cup of coffee after showing me the garbage bins.

  And I have arrived at mother and father—Emily and now Walt, that hugger-mugger working the room, hardly a poet we think of as a solitude man. But perhaps his thoughts about solitude are even truer to our condition as people who are not monks, but who long for love and for the privacy of mind. Here’s Whitman’s great solitude poem:

  I SAW in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

  All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the branches;

  Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous leaves of dark green,

  And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself;

  But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near—for I knew I could not;

  And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined around it a little moss,

  And brought it away—and I have placed it in sight in my room;

  It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,

  (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them;)

  Yet it remains to me a curious token—it makes me think of manly love;

  —
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,

  Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a lover, near,

  I know very well I could not.

  There is a reading of this poem, current today, that sees it principally as a testament of sexual love, as surely it is. But it is also a poem of solitude and has about it some of the urgency I felt in that Rilke line all those years ago—a love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. There is always this paradox in great passion—the desire to merge (or at least to be companioned) and the desire to be solitary, singular. The writer’s dilemma. And the lover’s.

  Emily Dickinson’s poem is more serene, more abstract than Whitman’s. She speaks of the human condition as a contemplative. He of the human plight as a lover. “Solitude is fine,” as Balzac said, “but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” This is where being a writer comes in. Solitude is fine, but we need to tell the page, the screen, the reader, that it is. Dickinson may not have needed the reader. Whitman panted after him.

  Like Beckett, we are beset with the inability to speak, with the inability to be silent, here in our solitude. But what, after all, is this solitude, what is it besides “being alone”? Kafka, always good for ratcheting up the misery quotient, said, “I need solitude for my writing; not like a hermit—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.” And wasn’t it a man almost dead who said to me, holding the warmth of his coffee mug, speaking out of nowhere except from the need to say something essential before he would speak no more, You need to keep part of your mind always to yourself.