Welcome to the return of Sunday Letters, the weekly newsletter on life, work, and the pursuit of happiness. This week, I'm reaching back into the archive and a short piece I wrote several years ago after reading The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. For today's issue, I have taken a few hours to run an edit over things and add additional thoughts. I'll do this for the next few weeks and months in an effort to revitalise the older posts and clean up some items of lesser quality. Articles such as this one deserve another airing and so I'm sharting with you today. Thanks for being a subscriber.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author writes on the turbulent writer's mind, how coffee somehow helps, and the merit in serving an apprenticeship. Annie Dillard first came to my attention several years ago when I came across the perhaps now over-played, yet accurate quote.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”
Annie Dillard
Annie Dillard's quote brings together a lifetime of experience and a philosophy of life in a single sentence. After a considerable time chasing ghosts, I eventually came up to speed with this idea, and it had a profound meaning for me. I have held on to it since.
It reflects the reality that there is no future and no past; there is no objective time. Tomorrow never gets here, because the moment it does, it's now. Yesterday or ten minutes ago is merely an echo of some other moment we noticed, like that song that keeps playing over and over in your mind. What you know as a song is a memory of a pattern, and when you heard it, it was note by note, space between note by space between note. When you hear that song in your mind, it is the pattern repeating itself.
So, spending our days ruminating over past mistakes or catastrophising the future is a waste of life. As Dillard suggests, how we spend our minutes, hours, and days, whatever it is that we find ourselves doing, this is our life. The memory and accumulation of these experiences and their associated emotional states are our record of what we made of ourselves.
If I am fortunate to be still here at 80 or 90 years of age and reflect on the life I have lived, what overarching emotion will I feel, and how will I consider my life? Will I smile, or will I cry? It’s likely to be a combination, but I guess that’s up to me. What I decide to do with my time now is all that matters. Will I resent not being given that opportunity? Maybe someone did something to me, and I still hold that against them. Did I spend my time worrying and afraid? Or maybe I spent my time in fantasy land and was never present and accepting of what was right in front of me.
I often find myself reaching for this quote when I deliver lectures or a talk on psychological skills or mental health. I think I'll get a wall decal for the kitchen to remind myself and my family of the importance of staying present in the here and now as often as possible.
Annie Dillard on Structure
In this particular passage from The Writing Life 1, Dillard goes on to suggest that in the infinite range of choices that life presents, structure is the key to purposeful activity.
“What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern”.
Many of us like to rail against the organisation and structure of society, and I’m no different. However, rather than the principles of order and structure being problematic, I believe other people’s orders imposed on us are the heart of our problem. In psychology, we describe motivation as being either intrinsic or extrinsic in nature; we're either motivated by some inherent force within us, a curiosity and an interest rather than a force outside us. Parents, teachers, bosses and so on, make demands on us and we comply. Something else internal is more sustainable, however.
We can't achieve freedom in life unless we order ourselves from the inside rather than the outside. Order and structure are essential to the creative process, regardless of how we wish to express it. As Dillard suggests, structure is like a scaffold from which we can build something unique, and from that something can be achieved. Whether we realise it or not, imposing a structure on ourselves is what we require for valuable creative work to happen.
“Why people want to be writers I will never know, unless it is that their lives lack a material footing” — Annie Dillard
In promoting the benefits of a daily schedule, Dillard offers the analogy of a scaffold upon which our work can stand. Without that scaffolding, little we do has any great effect. Working ad hoc without a structure can impose a lack of psychological direction. A life spent in this way, as artist and psychologist Erik Erikson suggested, can lead to despair. He writes of later life integrity in Identity and The Life Cycle 2;
“Despair expresses the feeling that the time is short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads to integrity. Such a despair is often hidden behind a show of disgust, a misanthropy, or a chronic contemptuous displeasure with particular institutions and particular people, a disgust and a displeasure which…only signify the individual’s contempt of himself. Ego integrity, therefore, implies an emotional integration which permits participation by followership as well as acceptance of the responsibility of leadership: both must be learned and practiced in religion and in politics, in the economic order and in technology, aristocratic living, and in the arts and sciences.”
Annie Dillard on Coffee
Each morning, I rise and go straight for the coffee machine. Lavazza is my brand of choice, although I have strayed to other brands, partially out of curiosity and partially in the hope of uncovering a more economical coffee solution, I find myself returning. And so it goes, a double shot topped up with hot water. Then another. By lunchtime, I've had three or possibly four, and after that, I'm done. It's the ritual, as much as it is the effect of caffeine, mind you. Then, the first meal of the day usually at 1 pm or 2 pm.
During her time writing a favourite but challenging book, Dillard tells of her time holdup in a one-room log cabin on a beech. She struggled to turn what she called “intellectual passion” into the necessary physical energy to write. To crank herself up, as she put it, she attempted to consume the most precise amount of coffee necessary to coax from herself the necessary words.
“I drank coffee in titrated doses. It was a tricky business, requiring the finely tuned judgement of a skilled anesthesiologist. There was a tiny range within which coffee was effective, short of which it was useless, and beyond which, fatal…Only the coffee counted, and I knew it. It was boiled Columbian coffee: raw grounds brought just to boiling in cold water and stirred. Now I smoked a cigarette or two and read what I wrote yesterday. What I wrote yesterday needed to be slowed down. I inserted words in one sentence and hazarded a new sentence. At once I noticed that I was writing — which as novelist Frederick Buechner noted, called for a break if not a full-scale celebration.”
Like so many writers, she seemed to struggle with the work. Despite the apparent cause for celebration, it may have been short-lived. She writes that, as with many mornings, that day she lacked the fuel for lift-off. She was starving but refrained from eating. Nausea might temper the energy, she thought, but eating would kill it.
“If only I could concentrate. I must quit. I was too young to be living at a desk…I returned to the papers and enclosed a paragraph in parentheses; it meant that tomorrow I would delete the few sentences I wrote today. Too many days of this I thought, too many days of this.”
How to find a way and emerge from the funk of creative block—I don’t know. Ok, we can try this or that trick, but most important, I think, is patience, even in spite of structure. Trying to force the creative energies, to coerce it, to try to fool it into being is wasted energy and counter-productive. It comes when it comes, and our job is to be there waiting for it, “pen-in-hand,” so to speak. When I force it, it's just shite. I need time on either side of it–the space for things to brew and percolate, like coffee. The ideas come, and they are real when there is time and space. It's a pity the world is unwilling or unable to pay you for that space. Regardless, creativity requires it.
Annie Dillard on Work
Dillard spent days writing and deleting, fighting the beast inside her. She says that the tender relationship with a work-in-progress can change in a twinkling, and if we miss a visit or two, it will turn on us. “You must revisit it every day to reassert your mastery over it”, she says. I'm not sure, though, if it is mastery over it. It seems to me that it is meeting it where it is and becoming aligned with it rather than commanding it.
The work shapes the artist. The work becomes the artist, and the artist becomes the work. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, vibration by vibration, we become integrated and assimilated by that which we give our time and attention. This is why daily repetition of the work is so important. It’s what serving an apprenticeship taught me and what is vital in any endeavour worth beginning. It becomes easier, does it not? Automatic. Our brains and bodies become wired towards Flow,
Dillard refers to the importance of serving such an apprenticeship.
“In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said “it is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body too. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain…the self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.”
There is something within us that wills to express itself. Society and all its rules place boundaries on that will, and it is overwhelming, even alienating. Society says this is how to behave, how to work, how to make a positive contribution and be valid and respectable. To be successful, we must conform. These rules, in large part, sculpt our surface-level personality and world view. So it is for many people that the deeper creative self is kept hidden, and all is the product of competition within the tight rules of the game.
The time spent in an apprenticeship is where we learn the rules of the game. But to learn the rules is not enough. Any eegit can follow rules, Jesus Christ. Are there not enough people following the rules? Learn how the system works, then break the rules and create something new. Csikszentmihalyi writes about this in his book Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention 3. Some of the most significant figures in the Arts & Sciences were those who learned the rules and then broke them.
“Once you find it”, Annie Dillard says, “and you can accept the finding, of course, it will mean starting again. This is why many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade. After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.'“
There are some psychological gymnastics to be accomplished here. Ok, we need cash in the bank to pay bills and put food on the table, but all our time cannot be dedicated to this immediate need. If it is, then our minds and bodies have to space to do the work that really matters, let alone find it in the first place. Stress and anxiety will be our constant companions. With work, all that matters is the work. Our job is to find that work and make time for it and nothing else.
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