Against Wind and Tide by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Author:Anne Morrow Lindbergh [Lindbergh, Anne Morrow]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307907141
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-23T14:00:00+00:00

Fall 1961 [DIARY]

Weeks have gone by again. No diary writing. Life becomes less vivid when I’m not writing in my diary. And yet I don’t let myself use “good writing time”—that is, mornings, for diary writing, except when I’ve come to the end of a period of book-writing, a temporary surcease, like this weekend.

I have been revising chapters steadily to get them in shape for Helen to see. She is now over here from Europe for two or three weeks. I need a fresh eye on this book very much. It’s one’s vision that flags, not one’s will power. As long as I can see something to do, to change, insert, or rewrite, then I’m hopeful. (“This will change it, this will make the difference!”) But when I can’t see, and feel it is all uniformly poor, then I am depressed. Compared to the vision I had of it originally, so many years ago, it seems like a total failure. But then, I always feel this way at the end of every book. One outgrows books in the process of writing. One outgrows the problems in them, which become stale, bromidic, unimportant. As Jung says somewhere, we don’t solve problems, we outgrow them.

I have certainly learned a great deal in the writing. It is not a novel, of course, though it is fictional. I have written a series of essays on love, marriage, relationships, etc., and put these into the mouths of not very real characters, speaking for me. But neither the characters nor the situations are real ones from my life. They are extrapolations of characters and situations. The writer of fiction extrapolates from tiny items in his own or other people’s lives, observed around him. Sometimes extrapolations are false, even in the scientific world; how much more so, then, in the world of fiction? Yet it is also true that you do not need to drink a pitcher of water, wine, or milk, to know the taste.

At this point of despair in writing, one says to oneself: Then, if it is so poor, why not throw it away? Why finish it? The answer to this, I suppose, lies in that saying of Isak Dinesen I have thought of so many times in the past three or four years, “When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope, suddenly the work will finish itself.” One goes on working “without faith and without hope.” And yet, if one works like that, “every day a little,” surely, that is faith?

I wonder always when I reread the quotation if she didn’t mean “without fear,” and often substitute “fear” for “faith.” (But perhaps Isak Dinesen was one of those people who have no fear?) It is fear that is so crippling to me: fear of failure, fear of mistakes, fear of criticism. One must work without fear as well as without hope. Perhaps both are pride, and certainly external to the heart of work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.