Not Knowing
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Last night, late, as my husband drove us home from a party in the city, I kept my eyes on the river beyond the expressway, lying black and low, with the moon on its back. I have loved that river—written about it and to it, stood above it and walked beside it—and yet so much of it remains mysterious to me, unknown. For all that the Schuylkill River has endured, she still retains her privacy. As do we all, I think.
We write so that we might know; isn't that true? Isn't a writer's first job to set aside the pre-supposed and to unwrap each story slowly? And isn't it true that, even after a book is done and being read by strangers, we drive in silence through the dark at night, full of not knowing and wonder?
5 comments:
Beth,
I'm so glad to see you've relinquished some of your own privacy to write this blog! I found you here about a week ago. Lacking anything profound to say, let me simply introduce myself as a reader who has, through reading, come to know you in a small way. Surely you write not only to know but also to be known!
Dear Lisa,
This is a very interesting question, and thanks for raising it on this rainy day. I will say this: I learned, this past year, that even my best attempts to stop writing, to give up the anxiety that comes with the pleasure, will always add up to nil. I've been writing since I was small; the process of locating stories and finding words, of teaching myself what I want to know, has a powerful, addictive quality to it. I'm simply not happy unless some part of me is at work with words.
So that is the impulse of writing for me. Publishing is different. I never published any of my memoirs to be personally known (in other words, I never saw my own life as particularly interesting), for example, but to share an exploration of those things that make us all human, to suggest the yield (the good and the bad) of a certain way of living. I published FLOW, my book about a river, to celebrate the river's hard-won revival and my city. The novels that I am writing now are liberating in different ways. True, like all fiction is true. And also absolutely not.
I appreciate your making me think about this today.
Thanks, Beth. I read contemporary writers because I feel there's community in the partnership between reader and writer, and it seems somehow tighter when the writer lives in the same generation I do. Even if I never find her in the blogosphere. :)
I guess as a reader, I read to know myself better, to understand my world and my place in it. I may not read to get to "know" the memoirist, but it happens just the same -- in a certain kind of writing, anyway.
Lisa
Beth & Lisa -
Write to know - write to be known - are they not, on some deep down level, the very same thing? Or at least, part of the same? As in water from the same source? Michel de Montaigne once said - ‘Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.’ To study and to write in order to know, includes therefore not just knowing myself, but myself as a representative of humankind. Myself in relation to humankind. And - as sharing is a basic principles which this world rests on - (after all, where would we be if the doctor refused to share his knowledge, if the baker did not care to offer us his bread?) - would it not be wrong if the writer kept all discoveries in her own notebooks?
Again to quote Montaigne: There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.
This blog - including comments - only verifies the truth in this, his - written - knowledge.....
Dear Lisa and Grete—
I appreciate this dialogue on a topic that is so extraordinarily broad. Why do we write? Why do we read? Why are these things important? When I wrote SEEING PAST Z, I was reflecting on all of these things, and I think that it's fair to say that there is no one answer, nothing absolute about it. I write for many reasons. I read for many more. I feel blessed to live a life that exposes me to so many stories, so many lives and dreams—and that forces me to push myself toward better understanding.
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