From Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom

“Art is one of the means of unifying people. ”

“If beautiful art does not express moral ideas, ideas which unite people, then it isn’t art, but only entertainment. People need to be entertained in order to distance themselves from disappointment in their lives.” — Kant

“Art is one of the most powerful means of convincing people of anything, both good and bad; therefore, you must be very careful in its use.”

An artist is one of two things: he is either a high priest, or a more or less smart entertainer. — Mazzini

“Meditations of discussions about art are the most useless pastimes known. Those who really nkow art nkow that art can speak well with its own language, and that to speak about art with words is useless. Most people speak about art do not understand or feel real art.”

I was feeling very Little Miss Super Pity last month. Cranky, blue, more than little lost. For a couple of reasons. The Extraordinarily Difficult Situation persists, as EDSs tend to do. At work, I was grandly misunderstood. And half a dozen people, all in the same week, asked me to read their manuscripts. All this extra work! Little Miss Super cried. Why me!? Why now?

Then I woke up the other morning and realized, in the knick of time, this: people ask me for an opinion. I have become the person, at least in this one way, an important way, I dreamed I might be. People around me—people I value very much—ask me what I think of their work. This is an honor, the wise part of me realized. And so I could explain it to the little whiny Miss Me. Yes. It’s some extra work. I know you want to ski and then come home and relax in front of the bug program (Life in the Undergrowth—it’s truly fantastic and helpful in coming to clarity re the work situation) and not read more pages tonight. But this is a privilege and you’ve earned it. To someone, your opinion matters a little. Isn’t that an amazing and blessed circumstance?

And I read the work of my friends, with grace and pleasure. And got over myself.

*

what I know about how

Meanwhile, here’s what I have noticed, in thinking about my students who are thriving as writers and my students who are struggling to make their work come alive on the page.  And in thinking about my own growth as a writer, what I know now that I didn’t know before, and how I came to know more about writing.

1. We don’t work on a piece of writing. We practice making every day. Pieces of writing evolve and improve from this practice. But it’s to a practice we go each day, not a sheet of paper, not a product, not a piece. Practice teaches us. Working on a piece only limits not only the piece, but the writer.
2. We don’t think about voice, audience, tone, or the point. We hope to get a little heat generated; the writing is rubbing our hands together and the process is seeing what happens next.
3. We don’t enter the writing studio with an idea or even a question. We begin the same way—some little ritual we’ve invented, based on what worked one day when we got lucky—every day.
4. We don’t miss too many days. When we do miss, we felt the cost, we sense what’s lost.
5. We work on two things. One thing is teaching is us (we’re making a huge mess). The other thing is where we see what we’ve learned (it’s always slighter than our dreams). Usually, the thing we love and want to show as Our Great Work! is the former. We learn more from our losses, our mistakes, our failures.
6. Stay in love with it (your house, your man, your project, the day) by steering always towards the mystery.

Don’t get sucked in to a project. Take classes. Teach someone else what you know.

Being human cannot be borne alone. We need other presences. We need soft night noises—a mother speaking downstairs, a grandfather rumbling in response, cars swishing past on Philadelphia Avenue and their headlights wheeling around the room. We need the little clicks and signs of a sustaining otherness. We need the Gods.

–John Updike

This is the epigraph to Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, Devotion, to which I am devoting myself at night; I love these configurations of God as relationship, God as connection, God as sound and pulse and joy.  Especially today. An awful hard day at school–fraught with misunderstandings. I miss my joy today.