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The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

…

The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item… I could be connected to the outer world by reason, if I chose, or I could yield to what amounted to a narrative fiction[.]

- Annie Dillard, An American Childhood*

I am an introvert, but don’t worry. I’m not about to launch into one of those self-fascinated pieces about how I am special and misunderstood. It’s just that I do have a very interior life, full of reflections and broodings and spun narratives. I imagine most writers are like that (perhaps not all), but I was struck by this passage and how it crystallizes a constant struggle of mine to do an objective assessment of my reality and spring it free of fancy, to know know what I actually know, and what I’ve constructed.

Writers tend to fancy that every bird symbolizes their own hope, and it’s easy to forget that the bird is minding its own business. This is why I opined recently that I wished I had majored in some “hard science,” where enough information surrounds an object that you can understand it on its own terms: the bird striking across the sky becomes a kestrel, and you know a thing or two about its behavior and habits, so it is no longer a stark image but a living thing. It is not there to inspire you; it is chasing a wren.

This bears on a work in progress and an essential scene — essential to character, not to plot — and I now know what I was trying to accomplish with that scene, though I don’t think I actually need to change anything.

*I may post more about this remarkable book, which recounts a cognitive and perceptual awakening by a child with astounding detail. I do not think Ms. Dillard has ever written a book for children, but her ability to recall the experience of being a child is like nothing I have ever read.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: childhood, dillard, interiority, shelley

There is a “Dear Teen Me,” meme that I have not done, but if I were to do it now, I might invoke my young self to stop reading Vonnegut, to read maybe one book each by Nabokov, Auster, and Delillo but not read them obsessively, so that my own writing become paralyzed with self-consciousness.

There’s nothing wrong with those writers, but every high-school aged boys with aspirations to write discovers Vonnegut, imagines himself to be the next great wit, and writes Vonnegut-tainted stories for a time, and emerges from the smothering style only when, as an upperclassman, he discovers the likes of Nabokov, Auster, and Delillo. And so, for a time, he begins soon abandoned self-conscious novels, talks about metafiction at parties to anyone who pretend to listen, and wonders if he needs to read more Thomas Mann to have literary street cred. I would like to stop teen me from taking those perilous steps and losing a decade to misdirection.

I would allow the Hawthorn, the Poe, the Steinbeck and Twain but only to have an anchor in Americana. I would discourage an scholarly inclination toward anything — if a story works, it works on instincts, not on explanations. I might even caution him to major in something besides English. Vonnegut was a mechanical engineer, after all, and Nabokov an entomologist. Major in geology or anthropology, I’d tell myself. Something that gets you outside and mucking around in the soil.

Literature built atop a tower of literature is the right road for someone else, but not for you. Your way into a story is the story, not the language. Your strengths are emotional, not cerebral. Find an anchor, a patch of soil to plant yourself, a way to see the world without words.

I would tell my young self to discover Sigurd Olson and Annie Dillard and the poetry of William Stafford and the essays of E.B. White, not because they tell me how to write, but because they tell me how to live.

I would tell myself to go for more walks.

I would tell myself to talk less and listen more.

I would tell myself to learn the names of trees and bugs.

I would tell myself to appreciate silence and the immense value of free time.

But knowing that teen me as I do, I know he wouldn’t listen to any of this.