Why Do It?

I’m reading Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, a compact memoir that’s both beautifully written and dense with wisdom. It’s also possibly the most discouraging guidebook I’ve ever read, less a description of the writing life than a warning, a skull and crossbones: a gentle reminder to abandon all hope.

Here’s a typical passage:

I do not so much write a book and sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Or this:

But you are wrong if you think that in the actual writing … you are filling in the vision. You cannot fill in the vision. You cannot even bring the vision to light. You are wrong if you think that you can in any way take the vision and tame it to the page. The page is jealous and tyrannical; the page is made of time and matter; the page always wins. The vision is not so much destroyed, exactly, as it is, by the time you have finished, forgotten. It has been replaced by this changeling, this bastard, this opaque lightless chunky ruinous work.

Sigh. I’m still not done, so there’s a small chance all of this gloom might resolve into some sort of hymn to the despite-it-all worthiness and exhaltation of the writing life. But I doubt it, and my own small experience tells me that this would be a false coda anyway. The actual process of writing is gruelling, unpleasant work, more an assassination of your vision that its realization.

So why do it? Dillard hasn’t offered any answers, yet, but I think I know what keeps me coming back. When things are going well, when I manage to squeeze out a story or a sentence or even a phrase that I didn’t think I was capable of, when for one brief moment the futility lifts like fog and I glimpse for the first time the landscape I’m trying to create: in that fleeting instant, I’m better than myself; better than I am.

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Transcendence. It’s why we seek out gods, make art, fall in love: to slot the broken pieces of ourselves into some larger vision that completes us, justifies us. We’re dropped flawed and yearning into a world that bewilders and bewitches us, and spend our brief time here clawing our way toward some vague dream of contentment.

That’s what art is, or can be: a momentary brush with that state of transcedence. It’s powerful, addictive mojo, beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.