Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is a truly remarkable book.
This point is really only a symptom of a deeper and even more common problem Wurtzel displays. She consistently writes as if the joy and happiness of people who “plan for the future,” the married ants rather than bed-hopping grasshoppers, is basically fake. It’s all a lie they tell themselves over the Folger’s coffee, to console themselves for their sacrificed passions. Marriage leads to divorce, “functional love includes a fair amount of falsity,” she imagines the life she could have had and it’s all lies about how talented her husband and children are, “happiness is the untruths we tell each other and ourselves or it would be unbearable.” She adds, “Or is that my untruth?” but honestly, she doesn’t seem to mean it.Because what’s so weird is that when it comes to her own life she’s able to claim both the misery and the joys as true. She can see that somebody else might view her misery as the more important part, but she doesn’t, and she genuinely believes that the joy is the “really true” part. Why on earth can’t she see that married people do the same thing–only they do it with a better purpose? They aren’t lying. They’re focusing on the part of their complex truth which sustains love. They’re making, often at great cost and with great humility, the choice to focus their attention on the truths which strengthen love and loyalty rather than the truths which might shatter it.
When the famous Beachy Head lighthouse on the Sussex coast was being constructed, in 1901, workers were taken to and from it by cable car.
“The Long-Winded Speech,” at the British Museum
I do feel that some people may be called to unbelief—or what looks like unbelief—in order that faith may take new forms. Emily Dickinson is a good example of this, or Albert Camus. But I also believe that God requires every last cell of yourself to bow down. Or perhaps that verb, requires, is wrong, or that it’s God doing the requiring: It’s more like your nature requires, in order to be your nature, that every last cell of yourself bow down. There is still some satanic pride in me, for which I pay a high price.And yet, I have certainly experienced peace in poems that in their sheer givenness seemed to reveal something of God to me. I have written poems that begin in great anguish and explode into joy. As psychically difficult as the poems may have been to write, certainly I have felt peace and presence in their wake.
There are other moments, too, which are simply moments of life. Simply! I think of the poet Paul Eluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.” I have 3-year-old twin daughters. It would be disingenuous in the extreme for me to pretend that they don’t at times drive all thought of God out of my head and make me want to write a series of sonnets in praise of celibacy, but it would be equally insane for me not to acknowledge that they are the source of my greatest happiness. Father Zossima, in The Brothers Karamazov, defines hell as “the inability to love.” I have known that hell, and I should probably spend my remaining days thanking God that I am free of it.
mark greer, poster design for the art directors club of houston
Agra, le palais de Shah Jahan dans le Fort Rouge. C’est là qu’il termina ses jours, face au Tadj Mahal, emprisonné par son fils Aurangzeb. février 1988.
The publications from The School of Life imprint further the same basic project: bring brisk, philosophically inflected practicality to universal dilemmas. There have been six books published in the series so far, one written by de Botton, the rest adopting his authorial technique. How to Stay Sane by Philippa Perry, epitomizes the worst tendencies of this formula: it amounts to little more than philosopher name-dropping with poorly written exegesis. “Socrates stated that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living,’” she writes. “This is an extreme stance, but I do believe that the continuing development of a non-judgemental, self-observing part of ourselves is crucial for our wisdom and sanity.” The whole book is composed of this kind of grinding obviousness, bizarrely sprinkled with a King Lear line, a Martin Buber quote, or a Wagner reference.Perry’s sentences are often so banal as to be parodic: “A group of people I find I always learn from are children, as they can offer us fresh eyes on the world and a new perspective”; “When I go away on holiday to a new place I feel refreshed by having been stimulated by new sights, smells, environments and culture”; “Each of us comes from a mother and a father, or from a sperm bank, and each of us was brought up by our parents or by people standing in for them.” The clunking truisms seem intended to give the book a straightforward tone, but instead leave the prose sounding lobotomized.
The author’s apparently robust mental health also makes her a dubious expert on her topic; no psychic discomfort more serious than indigestion seems to have troubled Perry. In one anecdote, an interior design magazine tips her equilibrium: “I felt dissatisfied. I found I was dreaming of replacing all my furniture. What was I doing? … I was breathing shallowly.” So Perry puts the magazine down, goes for a swim, and all is right. But, wait, she has darker moments: “I have noticed, as I play Bridge or Scrabble against a computer, or Sudoko for an hour at a time, that my emotional side feels cut off.” Those with more complex neuroses may find themselves less than convinced by the transformative power of Perry’s exercises.
Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It doesn’t count. He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…. Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
It’s pretty hard to have a “career” doing any single creative thing nowadays. If you really make a stir as a “science fiction writer” nowadays, you’re likely to get swept up in all kinds of network-society fringe activities, such as blogging, going to conventions, comics, gaming, TV, movies, collectibles…. The days when you could be a “science fiction writer” and work exclusively on books and magazines seem to have vanished already.I’m pretty sure that the best way to get a toehold in writing is to start writing work that you yourself want to read. Then, see who really cares about it, and try to understand why. Wasting energy trying to ace your way through collapsing industries is a drag. You should never be surprised if your most effective, most influential writing is writing no publisher will pay for.