Writing in A Circle of Quiet

Serendipity has brought me to another book, one I read years ago that had disappeared behind a cabinet. Now that we are moving everything around, it fell, almost literally, at my feet -- Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet. I didn't get it then -- too young I suppose -- but one reviewer praised it as "great consolation to ordinary people who sometimes wonder why they bother to get out of bed in the morning."

Here's a little:

"I go to the brook because I get out of being, out of the essential. I put all my prickliness, selfishness, in-turnedness, onto my is-ness; we all tend to, and when we burn, this part of us is consumed . . . I think that the part of us that has to be turned away is something like the deadwood on the bush; it has to go, to be burned in the terrible fire of reality, until there is nothing left but our ontological selves; what we are meant to be."

Ontology. The word about the essence of things; the word about being.

She also talks about self-consciousness, how real play (creativity) takes one outside of self and outside of time. "When self-conscious," she says, "we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first."

Another thing she says -- the moment that humility becomes self-conscious, it becomes hubris. The pride of putting oneself at the center of the universe.

I am, of course. The center of the universe. Only so is everybody else. Now that's a paradox that makes sense even if I can't articulate it. But what better description of the Divine than something capable of having multiple centers all at once? Alpha and omega, the beginning and end.

I'm getting trippy this morning. But the real thing I like about this book is her very familiar struggle to integrate writing and mothering and marriage and earning one's keep. The fear of both criticism and praise and how both are dangerous if they get in the way of the work having its way. The struggle to believe in herself and her work during her long dry thirties, her "tired thirties" when no one would publish her, and yet she kept writing because she had to.

She describes one particular letdown, how she covered her typewriter and decided to bake pies and give up on being a writer. And then she realized that she couldn't, that even if she never had a published book, she would write. She says, "I'm glad I made this decision in the moment of failure. It's very easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, then it is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all."

She said she tells herself, "What matters is the book itself. If it is as good a book as you can write at this moment in time, that is what counts. Success is pleasant -- of course you want it -- but it isn't what makes you write."

And here, here is the thing she said in response to her editor's criticism that it had been said better before. "Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me, ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little, that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try, to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die."

Or we die.

I think I forget this sometimes. I get too mixed up in genre classification. I am trying to write the best book I can right now and that will be enough. It will, in fact, keep me alive.