Walking on Water Read Online Free PDF Page B
Author: Madeleine L'Engle
anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”
—
When I was in college I knew that I wanted to be a writer. And to be a writer means, as everyone knows, to be published.
And I copied in my journal from Chekov’s letters: “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.”
I believed those words then, and I believe them now, though in the intervening years my faith in them has often been tested. After the success of my first novels I was
not
prepared for rejections, for the long years of failure. Again I turned to Chekov: “The thought that I must, that I ought to, write, never leaves me for an instant.” Alas, it
did
leave me, when I had attacks of false guilt because I was spending so much time at the typewriter and in no way pulling my own weight financially. But it never left me for long.
I’ve written about that decade of failure in
A Circle of Quiet.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons during that time, but there’s no doubt that they were bitter. This past winter I wrote in my journal, “If I’d read these words of Rilke’s during the long years of rejection they might have helped, because I could have answered the question in the affirmative”:
You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night:
Must
I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and testimony to it.
That is from
Letters to a Young Poet,
and surely Rilke speaks to all of us who struggle with a vocation of words.
—
The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.
The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that’s the basic difference between reading a book and watching TV. In watching TV we are passive; sponges; we
do
nothing. In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader “know” each other; they meet on the bridge of words.
So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for success, because that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid.
Yet with each book I write I am weighted with a deep longing for anonymity, a feeling that books should not be signed, reviews should not be read. But I sign the books; I read the reviews.
Two writers I admire express the two sides of this paradox. They seem to disagree with each other completely, and yet I believe that each is right.
E. M. Forster writes,
All
—
When I was in college I knew that I wanted to be a writer. And to be a writer means, as everyone knows, to be published.
And I copied in my journal from Chekov’s letters: “You must once and for all give up being worried about successes and failures. Don’t let that concern you. It’s your duty to go on working steadily day by day, quite quietly, to be prepared for mistakes, which are inevitable, and for failures.”
I believed those words then, and I believe them now, though in the intervening years my faith in them has often been tested. After the success of my first novels I was
not
prepared for rejections, for the long years of failure. Again I turned to Chekov: “The thought that I must, that I ought to, write, never leaves me for an instant.” Alas, it
did
leave me, when I had attacks of false guilt because I was spending so much time at the typewriter and in no way pulling my own weight financially. But it never left me for long.
I’ve written about that decade of failure in
A Circle of Quiet.
I learned a lot of valuable lessons during that time, but there’s no doubt that they were bitter. This past winter I wrote in my journal, “If I’d read these words of Rilke’s during the long years of rejection they might have helped, because I could have answered the question in the affirmative”:
You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night:
Must
I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and testimony to it.
That is from
Letters to a Young Poet,
and surely Rilke speaks to all of us who struggle with a vocation of words.
—
The writer does want to be published; the painter urgently hopes that someone will see the finished canvas (van Gogh was denied the satisfaction of having his work bought and appreciated during his lifetime; no wonder the pain was more than he could bear); the composer needs his music to be heard. Art is communication, and if there is no communication it is as though the work had been stillborn.
The reader, viewer, listener, usually grossly underestimates his importance. If a reader cannot create a book along with the writer, the book will never come to life. Creative involvement: that’s the basic difference between reading a book and watching TV. In watching TV we are passive; sponges; we
do
nothing. In reading we must become creators. Once the child has learned to read alone and can pick up a book without illustrations, he must become a creator, imagining the setting of the story, visualizing the characters, seeing facial expressions, hearing the inflection of voices. The author and the reader “know” each other; they meet on the bridge of words.
So there is no evading the fact that the artist yearns for success, because that means that there has been a communication of the vision: that all the struggle has not been invalid.
Yet with each book I write I am weighted with a deep longing for anonymity, a feeling that books should not be signed, reviews should not be read. But I sign the books; I read the reviews.
Two writers I admire express the two sides of this paradox. They seem to disagree with each other completely, and yet I believe that each is right.
E. M. Forster writes,
All