Why Write?
Why write?
A response to this question is a pretty standard essay for essayists, a pretty common post for bloggers, and (I suspect) a common entry in a personal journal or diary. I think about it pretty much every morning when I start the day’s journal entry, and I struggled with the question openly in the first entry of this blog and again in a post written a few weeks later. I’m sure the question has come up in other posts as well, simply because I remain unsatisfied with my attempts to answer it.
Last week, Sacha highlighted an old post on my blog about the value of keeping a notebook. Her post prompted Jeremy to offer a brief quote from Anaïs Nin: “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” I found that observation very intriguing, and set off in a search for the context in which she wrote it. I found online a fuller quotation from Nin’s diary, and posted that as a commonplace entry earlier this week.
When I arrived at the library this morning, I couldn’t resist the urge to seek out still more context. I found a copy of the appropriate volume of her diary (the whole of which requires 6 volumes in this edition). I find that Nin incorporates into her diary a letter that she wrote in response to someone who asked her why she writes. I think this is worth quoting in full:
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me: the world of my parents, the world of Henry Miller, the world of Gonzalo, or the world of wars. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and re-create myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.
We write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
– The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947-1955, edited and with a preface by Gunther Stuhlmann, Vol 5, pp. 149f.
This longer response to the question slammed my psyche this morning, in large part because it broadened the implications of the question “Why write?” Before reading it, I was already imagining the world that I fear that we’re making for ourselves here in the United States these days. As I imagined that, I wondered what I would be wishing for if I were still living in that world:
- Would I wish that I’d purchased books in cash rather than on credit so that credit card records wouldn’t show what I’d been reading?
- Would I wish that I’d given up library books (including the diary where I found this quotation) so that there wouldn’t be any library records showing what I found important and interesting?
- Would I wish that I hadn’t given up my subscription to the Washington Post and instead read (and contributed to) publications like ProPublica, The Guardian, Talking Points Memo, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic?
- Would I wish that I hadn’t supported representatives and organizations who were fighting for the rights of those who are being oppressed.
- Would I wish that I hadn’t attended one of the demonstrations of what I hope will be millions of people on 5 April?
- Would I wish that I hadn’t posted something like this, and a few other posts, that make my resistance efforts, feeble as they are, so public?
Or would I wish that I had done all of this and even more, even as I feared that my small contributions wouldn’t make much difference?
Years ago I read Václav Havel’s response to the question how he and others were able to create a functioning democracy so soon after the Communist system in Czechoslovakia toppled in 1989. I wish I’d kept better notes then, because I can no longer find the quotation. But he said something like “Because we spent so much time talking with each other even though it seemed clear that talking wouldn’t make any difference.“
I should write what I can. We should talk when we can. And we should fight while we can.
“… one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. … When you make a world tolerable for yourself you make a world tolerable for others.”