A Good Book. And yet...

I just finished a book and it was good, but I'm so glad to be done with it that I won't name it out of almost boundless respect for the author. That's not how the author would want me to feel. It's certainly not what I want to be feeling. How can a good book be something I'm so relieved to have finished? How can it have taken me so long to get through? Doesn't that mean there is something wrong with the book or with me.

Of course it doesn't.

There are times when a book just works this way. There are books that I just read this way. It isn't anything wrong with the book or with me. It's more like wearing shorts when the weather turns too cold. The shorts are perfectly comfortable otherwise but today it's just too damn cold for them. (As I write this it is seventeen degrees and I am in long pants, sweatshirt, and wool socks. Still I'm cold.) This was just one of those books.

And I know what to do when this happens: Dive into the next book. I have Diane Ackerman's One Hundred Names For Love and can't wait to begin. Well, I can wait long enough to write this short piece about reading, finishing things, starting the next, and finding that about all I need in this life are good books, strong black decaf coffee, the love of my family, and something with which to write.

Was the book I just finished a good book? Yes. Yes, it was. I'm thinking of it now and realizing the marks it has left on me. I may have gone through it so slowly because every fourth page or so moved me to write some new idea. Sometimes reading pushes me away from reading toward writing or living. That can be good. I'll know more about whether the book was good for me in a while. These things don't always come immediately.

In the meantime, I'm going to find out what Diane Ackerman has to tell me about love's one hundred names.

After Ongoingness by Sarah Mancuso

from Ongoingness: The End Of A Diary by Sarah Manguso

I meet people who consider diary keeping as virtuous as daily exercise or prayer or charity. I've tried for years, they say. I start a diary every January. Or I don't have the discipline. They imagine I have willpower or strength of character. It would be harder for me not to write it, I try to explain. It doesn't feel like (in one friend's words) a big fat piece of homework. I write the diary instead of taking exercise, performing remunerative work, or volunteering my time to the unlucky. It's a vice. (10)

As a child I tried to keep diaries and failed. Felt like a failure too. Every single time. Each attempt began with a new notebook, likely something cool or pretty. The first page scared me, but all it took was writing down the date, maybe the time and place, and I was underway. Except... There wasn't anything to say. Nothing in my life felt important enough to write down. It was all just my thoughts I knew for sure they weren't worth marring the pages of a clean book. There on the first day I was already stumped. But still I wanted to be writing.

One time I made it through a few days, maybe a couple weeks but then made the mistake of bringing the thing with me to school. Sixth grade. I wanted to carry it with me. I wanted to feel its presence all day long. I wanted someone to notice that I was keeping a diary. A journal. A book I was writing. Of course someone noticed. A boy in homeroom picked it up while I was out of the room. I came back to him reading aloud from it. Kids laughed. Not that it revealed especially embarrassing details of my life. It was all dull. That's why they laughed. Being revealed as a writer turned out to feel awful. That was the end of that diary. I can still bring to mind the red cover, those six tiny, chrome rings, the way it felt in my hand, and even the shape of my awful handwriting. I remember the store from which my brother and I had purchased them. His was blue. Mine red. I can also see that boy, my friend, and the rest of them laughing.

I gave up on that diary, but I didn't give up writing. I didn't give up on wanting to be a writer. I didn't lose the things I felt I was meant to say. I just hadn't found them yet. It took ten years to find even the first one. Ten years of continuing to write.

I do Morning Pages now and I suppose we can consider it a kind of diary. I'm just shy of 1,700 days in a row writing those. It fulfills most of the wishes I've ever had for filling pages. I don't leave it lying around in homeroom any more but neither do I worry much about the other kids laughing.

A diary (even if I call it Morning Pages) is a way to be writing, to keep track of the days, to think things through, to understand, and maybe to share with others. That last bit is tricky. Once written, the diary itself is probably worthless or nearly so if handed over to a stranger. The diary isn't a finished document and it isn't often even a draft but it can become those things. David Sedaris has done it. Dani Shapiro used her journal as a jumping off point. I need to check out Virginia Woolf's diary. And word is that Thoreau's journals are fantastic.

There comes a point in keeping a daily practice such as Morning Pages or a diary when there is no will power involved. At some point, and the point varies person to person, the decision to practice becomes so automatic it goes away. The practice itself does not grind down into routine, but the toughest part, deciding to do it, evaporates. This often coincides with someone else asking, how do you do it? and suggesting that you're amazing, but you and I know better. It's that we've been wanting to write since we can remember and have come to a point in our lives when this is what we do, this is who we are.

Then we pause for a moment, considering, and add that we came to that point so long ago it's tough to remember things being otherwise. We are writers.

Bookmark

In a used book I ordered off the web there is a bookmark from Island Books of Mercer Island, Washington. I've just lost half an hour on the Island Books website and wish it existed here in Syracuse. Since we don't have a store like that but I have the bookmark, I'm imagining Island Books and the person who bought this Dani Shapiro book only to give it up.

Still Writing is a nonfiction book subtitled The Perils And Pleasures Of A Creative Life and I wonder if the person buying it dreamed she would become a writer. I imagine her wanting to be like Dani Shapiro, writing memoirs, novels, essays, and maybe someday even a book about the craft. I imagine that woman back in 2013 holding the book in that faraway bookstore — a place in which it seems magic could happen almost regularly — and thinking, yes, it's time to tell my stories. Hearing her voice, I invent her name: Sarah.

I bought the book used from Better World Books, so the end of Sarah's writing story is cleae even if I haven't yet finished Shapiro's book. Sarah didn't write books, essays, stories, or much of anything. She bought the book and went outside into freezing rain. She hadn't worn a hat or a warm enough coat. There was a slight tear in her shoe or maybe the leather just soaked through on the way home. By the time she made it to her apartment she had grown deeply cold. She could not seem to stop shaking. The book felt clammy in her hand as she drew it from the cotton bag she had carried.

The book remained on a table for months. She started reading it a couple times, but it wasn't a page turner. Anyway, Shapiro's seeming effortlessness mocked her. Sarah moved the book to her shelf where it mixed with other books she had or hadn't read. Sarah went to work, met friends for drinks, and on a warm summer evening she sipped coffee at an outdoor table and saw a woman at another table look away each time Sarah looked up.

Three days later Sarah saw her again, this time at a friend's birthday party. "I'm Alice," the woman said. They talked through the evening and walked out of the party near midnight. At a corner where the woman was proceeding straight while Sarah turned left, they talked some more, neither wanting to say goodbye. Alice reached out to hug Sarah who took a chance, held Alice's gaze, and then kissed her. After that, there were very few more evenings when going home led them in separate directions.

Only weeks later, Sarah moved from her apartment into Alice's. Just months after that they found a small house with a view of a mountain that sprang from the earth as if out of nothing, magical and impossible. Having culled books once, Sarah again spread them on the floor of Alice's living room and made three piles: to keep, to go, to decide later. She pulled books from boxes and added them to the piles trying to get rid of as much of her old life as she could. Still Writing went to the third pile with four others. Three of those joined the small stack to keep but as for Shapiro's book, Sarah no longer remembered the day she had bought it. The book and her urge to write her story both went to go.

A postal carrier delivered Still Writing to my home in Syracuse. I'm on page 52 and still reading. I'm already telling my stories, but I appreciate the book's gentle nudge to go on. The book rests on the coffee table. I imagine it waiting for me to finish writing, something for which it waits patiently. Outside the wind blows hard and is full of snow. The bottom quarter of the window is frosted over.

Through the top I see hills, not mountains. These are are drumlins, elongated hills, heaps really, left behind as glaciers receded. The drumlins, dozens of them, are aligned all in the same direction and obscured by trees and the houses built along and atop them. The long slow inclines up one side drop sharply off the other. Our home is nestled in a hollow between several drumlins through which the wind is rushing. The furnace sounds in the basement and hot air blows through the grates. I type my story and send it out into the world where someone, maybe even someone in a bookstore on Mercer Island, might wonder who I am and what the rest of my story might be.

Copying Passages

from Devotion by Dani Shapiro, 159-160

The great yogi B. K. S. Iyngar once wrote, “The moment you say ‘I have got it,’ you have lost everything you had. As soon as something comes, you have to go one step further. Then there is evolution. The moment you say ‘I am satisfied with that,’ that means stagnation has come. That is the end of your learning; you have closed the windows of your intellect. So let me do what I cannot do, not what I can do.”

I was in no danger of self-satisfaction. I had arrived at an understanding of all I could not do, which felt like reaching the edge of the world. Once I realized that the things I had habitually used to prop myself up (the new pair of shoes, the good piece of news, the great review, whatever) were as fleeting as a sugar rush, they lost their luster. I had spent years—my whole life!—taping myself together like so many torn bits of paper, bolstering myself up with ephemera. What was I supposed to use to hold myself together, now they were gone? Oh, what’s that you say? The idea is not to hold myself together at all?

It felt as if another step, and I would free-fall. Another step, and who knew what would happen? There was no stopping, no pausing. Truly, there was no comfort. How long had I been at this? A year? Two? It was no time at all, in the greater scheme of things, and here I was. I had arrived—in the words of Thomas Merton—at an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and apparent chaos. This, Merton believed, was the only point at which faith was possible. But most days, I felt the chaos without the faith.

I had entered the closest thing to a solitary life that was reasonable for me, given both my nature and my circumstances. I spent my days alone. I didn’t answer the phone. I sat at my desk, walked the dogs, got p and stretched, sat back down. I lit a fire in the fireplace, unrolled my mat, practiced yoga. I sat on my zafu and meditated for fifteen minutes, twenty. I went back to my desk. Eventually three o’clock rolled around, or four, and it was time for Jacob to come home from school. I didn’t know how to transition from one to the other: from hermit to mom. From silence to homework. From inwardness to snack-making and Honey, how was your day. I struggled to get inside myself, and then—as if trapped there—I struggled to get back out. (159-160)

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I have for many years typed things that other people have written in order to have become part of me. As a kid I typed lyrics on Mom's college typewriter. For years I've typed poetry into the computer. Now it's a chapter of Dani Shapiro's Devotion today). I wanted to remember and have all those lyrics. I needed to be able to keep the poems I had begun to love. And now, more often than not and certainly in the case of the Shapiro quote, I want to take the ideas in and weave them into my DNA. Typing these things, copying them out like some medieval scribe imprints them on me. I am made a better person, someone with more ideas who yearns beyond what I even thought possible.

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Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it. (Goethe, qtd in Devotion, 236-237)

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In the back of my notebook, working from the last page forward until I meet up with the writing I have done starting from the front and working back, are quotes from the things that I read. I've often thought I should collect all these, type them into my computer, maybe create a database. Of course that would be too much work. It would take away from reading more books, writing more words, being a person in the world. Still, the idea lingers until I remember that I have already copied them down. It is enough. Perhaps I'll return to them but probably not.

Devotion is a book to which I can imagine returning, but I probably won't because I haven't yet read everything she has written. Inside the copy I borrowed from the library was a check out receipt from another patron who on the first of May last year took out three of Shapiro's books. I imagine that person and the image comes to mind easily, looking very much like me or however a person looks when they are seeking something and, holding three books in their hand, feels that they are well on their way, that some kind of understanding is inside those pages. They rush home, find a quiet place, and open to page one.

I can't wait to read Inheritance. I have so much to learn.