Marquette University Intimations Project

Anonymous

Letter from a Young Writer

Friend,

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we texture our lives. Dog-eared pages. Freshly brewed coffee. Rain on stained glass windows. Joni Mitchell’s guitar strings. Vermont maple syrup poured in a slow, sexy manner over pancakes. I think about all of this and more, especially now, after a year of what felt like floating around in the void of Zoom or Microsoft Teams (depending on your persuasion). 

I am of a generation – of a culture – that will do just about anything and everything if it means we don’t have to live inside of our own heads. So instead, we evade our responsibilities as human beings and run to little worlds that can take us away. We long for what is quick, easy, and mind-numbingly available, with a color palette that is overly saturated, ugly, and loud. We do not dare trust ourselves with stillness or quiet. 

For months, I’ve been unable to write. And for the life of me, I could not understand why. Even sitting here right now is making me physically uncomfortable. And it feels silly to have such a strong visceral reaction to the blank page, but I know that I’m not alone in this feeling either. Focusing on a single task over the last year has become near impossible. The anxiety that once lived and burned at the back of my throat has managed to rush its way upward, as quarantine has left me with the attention span of a squirrel (who apparently can’t find 80% of the nuts that they hide? I have to thank Sarah Silverman for that fun fact), or maybe that dog from Up on a good day. 

I imagine that David Foster Wallace would’ve categorized this collective anxiety as a sort of cultural hostility:

Here in the US, every year the culture gets more and more hostile — and I don’t mean hostile like angry — just, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated and that takes work to understand, because — well, there are a lot of reasons — but, particularly now in the computer and internet culture everything’s so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves but don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation. 

Life as a series of screens is not much of a life at all.

An obvious statement to make, sure. But one that feels necessary in this moment – if not for anyone else but me. For about a year, I denied myself this right to quiet. I did not nourish myself with the human, emotional, and physical texture that I needed. And it took a toll. 

The chronic pain in my neck and head was worse than it’s ever been. My mental health (like many others during this time) was at an all-time low. And it’s embarrassing to admit, but I really didn’t believe that I was going to graduate. 

I say this because every ounce of my being wanted to run away – to pull a Chris McCandless (minus the dying part) and just live in the woods to commune with nature and read and ponder the big think-thoughts forever. 

A bit extreme.

But that’s how I felt. And I think this desire was trying to tell me something. That I had failed to feed the part of myself that was so desperately crying out for quiet. 

Reading was one of the only escapes I had this year. Or, let me rephrase that. One of the only escapes I allowed myself to have this year. I indulged in this quiet, quite frankly, because it was part of the curriculum. What can I say, I am my mother’s child, and I know a two-for-one deal when I see it. 

But what’s so beautiful about books is that they are more than a means by which you achieve productivity, or even escape for that matter. A good book challenges you. Changes you. Forces you to hop over that wall of self. A good writer puts language to experience in a way that you didn’t think possible – in a way that makes you feel fully seen, heard, loved, and understood.

Books allow us to embrace quiet in a world that is constantly shouting at us to keep busy. They gouge us open because in that stillness, we are truly present. No longer distracted, we are forced to confront ourselves on the page – our grief, pain, suffering, beauty, joy – and come out the other side with a deeper truth. 

The authors I read in Women’s Lit this past semester have allowed me to inhabit this kind of space – to experience a richness, tangibility, and texture that my new world composed of screens simply could not provide. But reading these novels also made me wonder: how in the actual fuck did these women do it? 

How did they write, not just good novels, but great novels. Great novels with hundreds and hundreds of pages in them? How did they write it all? I’ve had what’s felt like endless amounts of time this year, but the process of stringing words together on a page has been nothing short of pulling teeth.

It wasn’t until I reached the very last class of my undergraduate career that the reasoning for my writing struggles truly and fully clicked. And it came from the mouth of the author who kickstarted this whole journey for me in the first place. It was simple and direct, and said in true Zadie Smith fashion:

Living is writing too.

So, I guess that’s what I’m left trying to do. Live. Tether myself to the things that really matter in this life: good people, places, food, coffee, philosophy, theology, poetry, art. I want to read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Joyce, Plath, Woolf, Wilde, Baldwin, Rilke, and Kafka. Listen to Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Lauryn Hill, Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan. Because in order to write you have to live. And we all need to gift ourselves the time, space, and textured experience in which our ideas can truly begin to take shape. 

I stayed away from the page because I wanted my writing to be perfect. Or, at least for my ideas to be perfectly understood. But if there’s one thing that living teaches you, it’s that humanity is a perfectly imperfect species. Bound to fuck up, but also bound to great beauty.

I choose both.