{"id":104688,"date":"2016-11-09T15:25:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T20:25:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104688"},"modified":"2016-11-09T15:57:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-09T20:57:46","slug":"i-will-pass-through-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/09\/i-will-pass-through-this\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI Will Pass Through This \u2026 \u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Shunsuke Matsumoto, Landscape with Bare Trees<\/i>, 1938.<\/p><\/div>\n

In light of the sad outcome of\u00a0yesterday\u2019s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

People are frightened of themselves. It\u2019s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we\u2019re supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2014Marilynne Robinson<\/a>, 2008\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people\u2019s pain. I\u2019m always conscious of that though I am less aware of it under certain circumstances\u2014good friends at dinner, other books. Teaching makes a big difference, but that is not enough. Teaching could make me into someone who is complacent, unaware, rather than part of the solution. So what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing the disorder, you are sovereign at that point. Struggling through the work is extremely important\u2014more important to me than publishing it.<\/p>\n

\u2014Toni Morrison<\/a>, 1993<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens. They are generally adults. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don\u2019t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don\u2019t take. This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity. Some people think, Well, what he\u2019s saying is we must praise his people. For God\u2019s sake! Go and read my books. I don\u2019t praise my people. I am their greatest critic. Some people think my little pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria, went too far. I\u2019ve got into all kinds of trouble for my writing. Art should be on the side of humanity.<\/p>\n

\u2014Chinua Achebe<\/a>, 1994<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Women are obliged to play at being what they aren\u2019t, to play, for example, at being great courtesans, to fake their personalities. They\u2019re on the brink of neurosis. I feel very sympathetic toward women of that type. They interest me more than the well-balanced housewife and mother. There are, of course, women who interest me even more, those who are both true and independent, who work and create.<\/p>\n

\u2014Simone de Beauvoir<\/a>, 1965<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

People who differ from one another or draw lines between each other on matters of \u201ctaste\u201d are a part of the class society, just as surely as wealth and power are parts of it. These are more than manners, in a society; these things politicize us. By demonstrating how Americans discriminate we are also being political, as writers. And as long as we have presidents who lie to us\u2014who use language as irresponsibly as President Reagan uses it\u2014we\u2019ll be political just by using language clearly. But I\u2019m getting tired of blaming Reagan for being Reagan; the American people have to take responsibility for this man\u2014they wanted him; they wanted him\u00a0twice …\u00a0<\/em>This is very troubling to writers; we couldn\u2019t have a president as irresponsible as this if the American people paid attention to language. The news is: language doesn\u2019t matter. But writers make language matter; we describe\u00a0exactly<\/em>. You see? Even caring about language becomes \u201cpolitical.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014John Irving<\/a>, 1986<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Those who have dominated our country most of my adult life are interested in maintaining an empire, subjugating other people, enslaving them if need be, and finally killing those who protest so that wealthy and powerful Americans can go on enjoying their advantages over others. I\u2019m not doing a thing about it. I\u2019m not a man of action; It finally comes down to that. I\u2019m not so profoundly moral that I can often overcome my fears of prison or torture or exile or poverty. I\u2019m a contemplative person who goes in the corner and writes. What can we do? I guess we can hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible, and hope that people are better than they seem. We can describe ourselves as horribly racist people, which we are, as imperialists, which we have been and are, but we can also see ourselves as bountiful, gracious, full of wit, courage, resourcefulness. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.<\/p>\n

\u2014Philip Levine<\/a>, 1988<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I was writing before politics impinged itself upon my consciousness. In my writing, politics comes through in a didactic fashion very rarely \u2026 the real influence of politics on my writing is the influence of politics on people. Their lives, and I believe their very personalities, are changed by the extreme political circumstances one lives under in South Africa. I am dealing with people; here are people who are shaped and changed by politics. In that way my material is profoundly influenced by politics.<\/p>\n

\u2014Nadine Gordimer<\/a>, 1983<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The need to restore warmth to people\u2019s lives is our most imperative task. This alone can save us, save the whole planet.<\/p>\n

\u2014Yevgeny Yevtushenko<\/a>, 1965<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be tyrannized by the part of yourself that\u2019s only interested in elsewhere \u2026 One is going to feel different things at different times. As Emerson said, \u201cOur moods do not believe in each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a mood in which you\u2019ll feel, This is a terrible fact about life. We\u2019re always going to be preoccupied by what we\u2019re missing, by what we\u2019ve lost, and there\u2019s no way around it. And in other moods we can think, Well, that\u2019s what it is to live a life, so get used to it, that\u2019s the point. That\u2019s not a problem, it\u2019s the point.<\/p>\n

\u2014Adam Phillips<\/a>, 2014<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The greatest compliment I receive is when people walk up to me on the street or in airports and say, Miss Angelou, I wrote<\/em> your books last year and I really\u2014I mean I read …\u00a0<\/em>That is it\u2014that the person has come into the books so seriously, so completely, that he or she, black or white, male or female, feels, That\u2019s my story. I told it. I\u2019m making it up on the spot. That\u2019s the great compliment.<\/p>\n

\u2014Maya Angelou<\/a>, 1990<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Bro, we\u2019re living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world\u2014high culture, low culture, bien-pensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it\u2019s important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I\u2019ve memorized this line from Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud\u2014\u201cI salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive.\u201d Given the state of things, that\u2019s what we need to be doing, all the time\u2014negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive.<\/p>\n

\u2014Mark Leyner<\/a>, 2013<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoyevsky\u2019s Notes from Underground<\/em>\u00a0is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism;\u00a0Don Quixote<\/em>, Man\u2019s Fate<\/em>, Oedipus Rex<\/em>, The Trial<\/em>\u2014all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? \u2026\u00a0For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms<\/em> of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group\u2019s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group\u2019s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group\u2019s attempt to humanize the world. It\u2019s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base.<\/p>\n

\u2014Ralph Ellison<\/a>, 1955<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

We\u2019re now in the twenty-first century and have seen so many metatheories fail that we\u2019re very skeptical, appropriately skeptical, of all of them. But I think we\u2019re still in search of them and always will be, because we apprehend that there is coherence in the universe. We understand that what appears chaotic is merely the result of a limited point of view. If you can view chaos itself from God\u2019s eye, you can see great patterns. Everybody from Aristotle and Plato to Wallace Stevens has written about this.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The point is to pierce the veil of illusion and see underneath to the skeleton, to the infrastructure, to the plumbing, and see how this stuff is actually made and how the magic effect is produced. You can\u2019t live as anything other than history\u2019s fool if you don\u2019t make an effort to do that. I mean, you will always wind up being history\u2019s fool\u2014it\u2019s not like you\u2019re going to get out of it\u2014but the only hope we have is for people not to be literal readers, not to be fundamentalist readers, and to understand that, from the Holy Scriptures on, the whole point is to interpret and to understand. I think theater forces you to do that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u2014Tony Kushner<\/a>, 2012<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Culture is continuously adapting to new situations. There will probably be a different culture, but there will be a culture. After the fall of the Roman Empire there were centuries of profound transformations\u2014linguistic, political, religious, cultural. These types of changes happen ten times as quickly now. But thrilling new forms will continue to emerge and literature will survive.<\/p>\n

\u2014Umberto Eco<\/a>, 2008<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

VOZNESENSKY<\/p>\n

I learned some new words on this tour.\u00a0Speeding!<\/em>\u2014I like this word. I didn\u2019t know it before. And I always knew the word\u00a0fuck off<\/em>, but I didn\u2019t know\u00a0fuckup<\/em>. So on this trip, I have two new knowledges:\u00a0Speeding<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0fuckup<\/em>.\u00a0Fuckup<\/em>\u00a0I like very much.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You tell a\u00a0fuckup<\/em>\u00a0to\u00a0fuck off<\/em>.<\/p>\n

VOZNESENSKY<\/p>\n

Certainly, yes.<\/p>\n

\u2014Andrei Voznesensky<\/a>, 1980<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Akhmatova I never met. She died in \u201966 and I never encountered her, but she\u2019s an old friend of mine in spirit. She taught me something, taught me the possibility of dealing quite directly with the most painful experiences \u2026 Requiem 1935\u201340<\/em>\u00a0is a good example. The background of the poem was excruciating, and yet out of it she made a poem that is personal at its immediate level but universal in its ultimate form. It transcends the personal by viewing the historic occasion through the lens of individual suffering. Nothing is diminished in her poems: all her adversities and humiliations. She wrote with such burning and scrupulous intensity that she became part of the historic process itself\u2014its conscience and its voice.<\/p>\n

\u2014Stanley Kunitz<\/a>, 1982<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cTo N. V. Rikov-Gukovski,\u201d by Anna Akhmatova, from issue no. 26 (Summer\u2013Fall 1961):<\/p>\n

All is despoiled, abandoned, sold;
Death\u2019s wing has swept the sky of color;
All\u2019s eaten by a hungry dolor.
What is this light which we behold?<\/p>\n

Odors of cherry-blossom sigh
From the rumored forest beyond the town.
At night, new constellations crown
The high, clear heavens of July.<\/p>\n

Closer it comes, and closer still
To houses ruinous and blind:
Some marvellous thing yet undivined,
A fiat of the century\u2019s will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In light of the sad outcome of\u00a0yesterday\u2019s election, here are some excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that might offer solace, or inspiration, or a cudgel against complacency. \u00a0 People are frightened of themselves. It\u2019s like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we\u2019re supposed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[9790,1132,10113],"class_list":["post-104688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-inspiration","tag-interviews","tag-writers-at-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nI Will Pass Through This: Solace and Inspiration from Writers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In light of the sad outcome of yesterday\u2019s election, here are excerpts from our Writers at Work interviews that offer solace and inspiration.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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