Searching After Wildness - journals of a photographic artist

Last summer, I read “A Wrinkle in Time”, a children’s book by Madeleine L’Engle. I had just finished reading four Harry Potter books in a row and was on a fantasy kick. In the following months, I read several more of her books, both fiction and non-fiction. So now, I pretty much adore Madeleine L’Engle. In fact, I’ve got a current formula for when I can’t decide what book to next read: L’Engle for soul, and any one of Terry Pratchet’s numerous Discworld books for amusement.

Anyways, back to Madeleine. There’s a deep earnestness in what she writes that brings out a sense of a life worth living. Not a fantasy-everything-is-hunky-dory life, but a real fully alive kind of life.

In her book, “A Circle of Quite”, she describes the danger of self image, and advertising:

Give the public the “image” of what it thinks it ought to be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to the image, and further from reality.

Self image pulls us away from reality. Deep, isn’t it?

Following that, L’Engle describes going through rejection:

…during that decade when I was in my thirties, I couldn’t sell anything. If a writer says he doesn’t care whether he is published or not, I don’t believe him. I care. Undoubtedly I care too much…. Every rejection slip – and you could paper walls with my rejection slips – was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre.

She goes on to describe how several of her books were turned down and how she felt guilty that her writing had taken away from being with her family. This culminates in a difficult rejection on her fortieth birthday:

So the rejection on the fortieth birthday seemed an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie. I covered the typewriter in a great gesture of renunciation. Then I walked around and around the room, bawling my head off. I was totally, unutterably miserable.

Then I stopped, because I realized what my subconscious mind was doing while I was sobbing: my subconscious mind was busy working out a novel about failure.

I uncovered the typewriter. In my journal I recorded this moment of decision, for that’s what it was. I had to write. I had no choice in the matter. It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not. It didn’t matter how small or inadequate the talent. If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing.

…. What matters is the book itself. If it is as good a book as you can write at this moment in time, that is what counts. Success is pleasant; of course you want it; but it isn’t what makes you write.