All that each person is, and experiences, and shall ever experience, in body and mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced nor has it ever quite had precedent; but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe."
-James Agee
I did a lot of reading on vacation - not the books I took with me but "found words." I am one of those people who can hardly be without reading material, and can hardly be around words without reading them. So although I took a stack of books with me to Gooney Lodge this week, I ended up discovering The Claremont Review of Books, several copies of which were in an old crock used as a magazine holder. In that publication I read reviews of many more books I want to get my hands on before we leave for Malaysia - a collection of the writings of Samuel Johnson, a new critical biography of W. H Auden whose poetry I have always loved but whose life I know nothing of, a study of the idea of Evil in its manifestations "from Beelzebub to Bin Laden."
But I also found myself despairing over how little I have read, how little time I have to read, how narrow my perspective is, how pedestrian my own thoughts are compared to the wealth of words penned by others. I wondered if I should ever bother write at all, if my time would not be better spent in reading, contemplating the words and thoughts of better minds than my own. This week, for example, I came across W. H. Auden's comments on the essential loneliness of man and also his thoughts on the superiority of marriage over a passionate affair, and was incredibly moved by both. I, too, spend a lot of time thinking about loneliness and about marriage, but I wondered if I should be "quick to hear and slow to speak," if I should "let my words be few" in the presence of poets and philsophers wiser than I.
Then I read the quotation above by James Agee and stepped back to ponder it. I believe it is true that I (like each of us) am indeed unique in the universe, in all of time. While the issues of life have been considered and discussed for thousands of years, while lovers since Eden have felt similar longings and heartaches, while marriages- happy and unhappy- have always shared certain elements, while mothers and daughters have loved and fought and cried and separated in similar ways; no one in all of time has ever lived my life, or ever will. No one else will ever live the exact life I have lived, with the precise combination of influences, with the same DNA, with the same soul. Although there is much that is shared by all humanity, there is as much or more in each of us which is utterly unique, never known before and never to be experienced in exactly this way again. So it is possible that I might have something to say that is unique to my voice, my heart.
I thought, too, about John Updike's poem, Perfection Wasted in which he likens each of our lives to a stage performance with a sympathetic audience. I don't like the poem; it's tone is all wrong for me, but I do appreciate the metaphor. Each of us has his own audience made up of people whose place in space and time intersects our own in sometimes mundane and sometimes dramatic ways. The chemistry between each of us and our respective audience members is not reproduceable. It will not happen again. Ever.
I thought about some of the implications of that truth. Although I am not the best mother in all time - what a laughable thought - I am the only mother seven people will ever know. While I may not be the wife of every (any?) man's dreams, I am the only wife my husband has. My thoughts and words may be feeble, awkward, inelegant or stumbling, but they still have an audience and a venue no other voice shares.
The author John Gardiner reassures aspiring writers that even if a thought, a metaphor, a word choice is not absolutely unique (could there still be "virgin metaphor" after thousands of years of human thought and experience?) a writer may yet be original in the sense that he finds his own words, "never before thought of as far as he knows."
As far as he knows. . . which is about as far as any of us can go. His own words . . . earned through hardship, purchased by experience, lived and cried and suffered for, etched upon the one soul which is different from all others for all time and eternity. If we speak from our hearts none of us need fear committing plagiarism or unoriginality. So I guess I'll write some more.
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*"In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter." W. H. Auden
"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is more interesting and significant than any romance, however passionate." W. H Auden
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