the written word

from ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ by Milan Kundera

That night Tamina dreamed about the ostriches. There were standing against the fence, all talking to her at once. She was terrified. Unable to move, she watched their mute bills as if she were hypnotized. She kept her lips convulsively shut. Because she had a golden ring in her mouth, and she feared for that ring.

Why do I imagine her with a golden ring in her mouth?

I can’t help it, that’s how I imagine her. And suddenly a phrase comes back to me: ‘A feint, clear, metallic tone – like a golden ring falling into a silver basin.’

When he was very young, Thomas Mann wrote a naively entrancing story about death: in that story death is beautiful, as it is beautiful to all those who dream of it when they are very young, when death is still unreal and enchanting, like a bluish voice of distances.

A mortally ill young man gets on a train and, descending at an unknown station, enters a town whose name he does not know and rents rooms in an ordinary house from an old woman with a mossy growth on her brow. No, I am not going to relate what happens in that rented lodging, I only wish to recall a single, trivial occurrence: passing though the front room, the ill young man “believed he heard, in between the thud of his footsteps, a sound coming from next door, a feint, clear, metallic tone – but perhaps it was only an illusion. Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin, he thought…”

In the story, that small acoustical detail remains inconsequential and unexplained. From the action’s standpoint alone, it could have been omitted without loss. The sound simply happens; all by itself; just like that.

I think Thomas Mann sounded that “feint, clear, metallic tone” to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty), and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

(Yes, I realize you don’t know what I’m talking about, because beauty vanished long ago. It vanished under the surface of the noise – the noise of words, the noise of cars, the noise of music – we live in constantly. It has been drowned like Atlantis. All that remains of it is the word, whose meaning becomes less intelligible with every passing year.)

The first time Tamina heard that silence (as precious as a fragment of a marble statue from sunken Atlantis) was when she woke up in a mountain hotel surrounded by forests on the morning after she had fled her country. She heard it a second time when she was swimming in the sea with a stomach full of tablets that brought her not death but unexpected peace. She wanted to shelter that silence with her body and within her body. That is why I see her in her dream standing against the wire fence; in her convulsively shut mouth she has a golden ring.

Elizabeth Gilbert on writing…

As for discipline – it’s important, but sort of over-rated. The more important
virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will
always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make
vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You
will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write
after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also
self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly
love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I
was writing “Eat, Pray, Love”, I had just as a strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS
ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a
clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was
agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not
my problem.” The point I realized was this – I never promised the universe that
I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I
put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After
years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his
hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My
friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent
filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have
all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc.
Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along
these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted
to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s
certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to
hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.”
I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful,
entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the
world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Always, at
the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to
work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another
reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come
from another place.