This week I assigned my undergrads to spend at least twenty minutes either lying on the floor or going for a walk. They could do neither I told them, and also, of course, there was no way for me to check. They could do anything that held the spirit of this idea; it just had to be quiet. They just had to be alone and without phones.
One of them had asked about establishing a writing practice. I gave them the spiel I always give: to be merciless about setting aside time, time that is doable no matter what, to not overreach and then hate yourself; but cordon off small sections that you refuse to give back, to be merciless about protecting that—no phone, no other reading or assignments, no email—but then, within that time, to be merciful. To acknowledge that within that time, they might not write a single word, might just think, walk, lie on the floor, tap their ankle with their thumb and stare out into space and wish they’d signed up for theater or music class instead.
They’re all hard workers, incredibly sharp. They’ve done so much to get into this fancy college and the idea of unproductive time is hard for some of them to grasp. It’s also hard for me. Often, especially lately, when I give this spiel, I feel like a honking awful hypocrite.
Last year, for months, commuting to all my various gigs and finishing the final edits on the newest book, listening to hours and hours of history to convince myself I would eventually find my way to another book, laundry, kids, I carried Shirley Hazzard’s essay collection everywhere, even though I’d finished reading it. I’d rifle through my bag, and it would appear. Hazzard’s photo is on the cover, and I love her. I love all her books. And also, the title would appear to me each time this happened, and I’d think, right, sure, I am the least subtle person in the world. The title of the collection is We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think.
What I understood but couldn’t quite touch last spring was that I had been running fast and sure from silence for months. I would turn on podcasts until the second I got in the shower, tee them up again the minute I got out. I re-listened to so many of my favorite long luxurious novels. I know the plots already, so I just let Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina wash over me as I ran or folded laundry or walked the dog.
I knew I needed silence, but I didn’t want it. It felt wonderful, most of the time, all those gorgeous sentences running through my brain instead. I do not believe in novels as catharsis, but I had touched something writing this new book, something hot and prickly, that had been roiling underneath for too long, and I didn’t want to be inside my brain or body for a long time after that.
And perhaps this doesn’t make sense, perhaps I need to describe further: Have you ever spent a stretch of time in which your first waking thought is: how is it possible that no one has yet invented a device such that sometimes we might crawl quietly outside our own skin, outside our own brains and bodies for stretches of time?
All those other books, those voices, running constantly through my head, they felt the way they often feel to me, nourishing and good—when I think about why it’s so important to me that my kids read, it’s not because I have some idea that it will make them more successful in the world (there’s a joke here but I don’t want to make it about humanities, AI, blah blah, about what success means and money but it’s too depressing to me to make so I’m not going to) but because I want them to have this feeling to dip into, not only protective and escapist, but also, from which they can return nourished and bolstered by the surety, the rich lushness of it.
I am not a person who writes every day nor every week nor every month, and this stretch—listening to and reading other people’s work voraciously but not even wanting to hear myself think—for the most part, combined with whatever accounts for busy-ness, it felt sufficient. I love work, love jobs, love doing things that feel immediately and assuredly productive. (This is also a pathology I realize; I’m writing this newsletter because my children requested another hour to hang out, and I already folded all the laundry and cleaned the kitchen, and I needed something to do with my hands).
I told myself I was doing research. About once a month I kicked and screamed (but quietly) to my husband about not writing, and, because he’s kind and good and patient, he listened to me and then reminded me of all the times before that felt a lot like this.
What was different this time though was the doggedness with which I avoided silence. In a life that mostly feels quite frantic, a little manic, my devotion in this time to not-stillness was unmatched. I did, finally, this summer, begin to worry. We moved, I had a thousand things to do, I could mostly ignore it. And also, any time I found a couple of hours I was unable to sit for more than twenty minutes at a time. I found so many different tabs to open and then to scroll through on my computer. I found another book to read, another interview that I’d already read but that I could transcribe into one of my teaching notebooks for the fall.
My body started doing what I think of as the rattling. I rattled, jangled, in my shoulders, teeth, neck, ankles. Sometimes, when out with the kids, I’d have to hold tightly to my leg or arm as the kids talked to try to look more still. I thought again, if I could just somehow escape this specific body, this specific brain for the smallest stretch of time, I’d be okay.
And then, last week—and this, of course, is why all the reading was and is still the answer; this, of course is why, insofar as someone has invented a device to slip free of ourselves and enter other brains and bodies for a while, it is books—prepping for class, I read this great line in the Edna O’Brien Paris Review interview: “When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there, and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate.”
And then this from the Deborah Eisenberg interview: INTERVIEWER: So you hate making things up, but you have to start somewhere. How does that usually work for you? EISENBERG: I hardly know, myself. I can’t explain it, I can’t account for it. I don’t feel that I have what people mean by an imagination, but when you fall asleep, your dream doesn’t start by scratching its head and saying, Oh, no! I can’t think of anything to dream!
I think likely, a thousand other snips from a thousand other things had finally accumulated. I had an itch of something. I dropped our older daughter at school then just kept going into Manhattan on the subway. I felt that little prickle maybe of wanting to be somewhere sacred-feeling, somewhere where laundry was not possible, where it might not seem necessary that the dog take another walk. I had written to you all very recently of the sacredness I felt when I first went to graduate school. I went to my favorite campus library. I opened a fresh document and titled it “enter the dream”. I think that came from somewhere besides the Eisenberg, but then, as I scrolled back through my tabs I couldn’t find where. It’s not a new idea. Fiction is not life. It wasn’t even fiction I was entering. It was sentences, a mucking around inside language because suddenly I felt like something might be there. Not productive, no plan, no ideas, just language. Enter the dream, I typed a few times when nothing appeared, but then new and other, different ideas did.
A few days later, I dropped our younger kid at school and started running away from home instead of toward it. I’d planned to run, had my shoes and keys and phone, but I went toward the Brooklyn Bridge and then over and then down to Battery Park and up the westside highway, air pods not in, silent, trying to get inside the dream again. I took the subway home and typed into my phone and almost missed my stop.
What I’m saying is that it doesn’t come for months, and it is awful, strange, and jangly. You read and read and read and read and listen, fidget, and then slowly, quietly the dam builds, and then, you feel safe or sure or desperate enough to be quiet, still; bolstered by all those other writers you’ve been reading, you find a little crack, it lets you in the dream again.
PS: I always forget (or maybe just don’t know) how Substack is supposed to work, and/but, in the stead of working on a novel, I received the very fun assignment of talking to Gillian Anderson about her new book (also the title of a book I wrote once) WANT. You can read that here. And also: my new book, (the one with the hot prickly thing that maybe scared me for a long time) is called The Float Test, it’s out in April, you can (and should, and please do) pre-order it here.
This is a beautiful post. ❤️🙏
just what i needed, thanks 🤍