A recurring theme throughout your book is that good writing, like all good art, emerges from love quite than anger, anxiety, or contempt. You indicate that “God created out of affection and delighted in life, and when he looked upon his work, he pronounced it good.” As creators, we create best after we imitate the Creator. What are some cultural conditions that present obstacles to creating from love quite than from aggression or fear?
Setting aside for the moment the undeniable fact that love may be indignant—that there may be loving anger—I believe there’s an ideal deal of vagueness and confusion across the definition of affection, which results in people pursuing 50 various things, only one in all which I recognize as deserving of the word.
In the book, I take advantage of a definition of affection drawn from Erich Fromm, a social psychologist. The essence of affection, he argues, is giving out of 1’s aliveness, out of what’s most important within the self. That is, in some ways, a really old-fashioned, forgotten, almost obsolete understanding of the word. We should know what we’re talking about before we are able to even describe what we’re searching for or what’s missing. And it takes an ideal deal of time to succeed in that time; as Fromm says, it’s the love of a mature person. It just isn’t a baby’s love or a dog’s love. It just isn’t the love of ice cream or money.
Throughout the book, you draw parallels between robust faith and robust art. Can you talk slightly more about that correspondence?
I believe the work of an artist can only be as deep because the artist herself, whether or not that depth is a everlasting condition—whether or not it’s achieved by the grace of God. Faith is one avenue that has been known for 1000’s of years to deepen the self, past where we’d expect it to go.
Drawing on observations from the essayist Sven Birkerts, you indicate that as our world has grown more connected laterally, it has grown shallower and flatter as well. How do the self-love and the flattening that you simply see in our creative life correspond to the self-love and flattening that you simply see in our faith life?
Decades ago, thinkers and culture critics like Guy Debord and Neil Postman wrote in regards to the transition of human society away from print, toward images. That was likely step one into shallowness: the reduction of attention, of internal subjective engagement with words, to that which could possibly be grasped visually inside seconds.
That process has accelerated. It resembles a reversal of the spread of literacy. Prior to widespread literacy, images were all that we had. But those were meant as tips that could a deeper truth. To take one example, consider the gold paintings produced by the medieval Italian artist Giotto: They weren’t presupposed to represent the self or self-expression but a deeper relationship to God. So even those images weren’t functioning in the best way that images are today: as marketing tools, as entertainment, as objects of consumption.
Can there be deep images? Certainly. Are we primarily creating and interacting with deep images? I don’t think so. There’s a hypothesis that poor teaching of reading in younger generations has led to a greater embrace of the video format. That will be the case. It may be that video and visual formats are easier to interact with, demand less from us, and require less skill to know. But regardless of the source, we’re disinclined to grapple with difficult, thoughtful, deep texts and really much inclined to spend our time on screens. This has produced much shallower writing as well.
You have a whole chapter on vocation within the context of art and writing. Here, you utilize the powerful example of an orchestra inside a rehearsal room stuffed with toppled chairs and music stands, with only a couple of instruments being played. But outside within the hallway are 100 violinists brawling.
The point of the illustration is that each one the violinists think everyone else ought to be a violinist and have persuaded everyone to play the violin. The orchestra, in fact, suffers for it. What does this illustration show us about creativity, the church, and, particularly, vocation?
I’ve noticed in human beings, no matter affiliation, a bent to maneuver with the bulk, to agree with the bulk, which makes each living and pondering easier. But it doesn’t make living deeper or higher, and it doesn’t make pondering deeper or higher.
There can also be a deep insecurity in individuals who haven’t yet grappled with their very own smallness, with the inconsequentiality of being a handful of stardust in an unlimited void. Such people are likely to require others to strengthen their very own sense of self. One way of doing that is pressuring others to evolve to the very same decisions that one has made personally, because to see other people making the identical decisions is reassuring and reassuring, whether or not those decisions are correct. You can see this within the church and in society, in every country, in each time, in every place.
It is true that individuals whose lives appear much like the lives of those around them can have deep faith, incredible character, and integrity. And it’s also true that those qualities can belong to people whose lives don’t conform in any respect. The point just isn’t nonconformity, which could be very often as shallow and meaningless as conformity, but something else entirely. It’s not the image or the performance that matters here but obedience to the decision.
The orchestra, in other words, needs all of the players.
The orchestra represents a really specific instance of this. I believe the body of Christ is named to work toward a single higher purpose, for which we’re all in harmony but not in unison.
You mention in passing that many adults prefer the genre of young adult literature. Why do you think that that’s? And why is that a priority?
I believe the overwhelming majority of human beings have lost an ideal deal of the flexibility to pay attention for prolonged periods of time on complicated and ambiguous texts and on complicated and ambiguous art basically.
I’m not keen on genre distinctions basically—these are a recent marketing tool introduced in publishing to assist categorize and organize the explosion of books coming to market. But in the event you take a look at the books that were written specifically for the YA market versus books that were simply slotted into YA, which I believe are two different phenomena, you’ll see differences. Among the intentionally YA-oriented titles, there’s a bent toward simplistic, Manichean situations of excellent and evil, easy ideologies, shallow characterizations, and thrills and exciting scenarios that don’t require an ideal deal of understanding to enjoy.
I don’t think, nevertheless, that this movement toward more digestible reading is restricted to YA. You can see it all over the place, including in literary fiction and other genres, and I believe it’s indicative of how we’re changing as a complete.
Related to this concern, you spend a while arguing against the concept literature can and even should increase empathy. You query, as well, the concept literature must be justified by its moral goodness. Following H. L. Mencken, you attribute this impulse to our history of Puritanical pondering. What do you think that we lose in literary appreciation after we rely on these rationales?
I’ve never been particularly concerned with classifying human beings as exclusively good or evil, because we now have the potential for each good and evil inside us in any respect times. I’m not a very good person; I’m not a foul person; I’m a human being, with all that that entails.
What I believe reading can do is remind us of the values that outlast millennia, that outlast empires. These values encourage us to look for what is bigger than ourselves. The Twenty first-century deal with empathy as a method of developing morality has taken us to some very dark places, where feelings substitute for justice, for fact, or for truth.
You speak about how essential it’s for writers to have a deep love of language. How is that this inextricable from a love of truth?
Writing is a method of pondering. It is a way by which we come to grasp what we ourselves think, after which revise what we expect after we see how badly we now have written it. There’s great value to trying to find precisely the correct words, the correct vessels into which we are able to place our meaning, in order that readers might receive it as completely as possible. In fact, this process has an ideal deal in common with trying to find the reality. Writing is a method of finding the shape by which to put the reality that—if we’re lucky, if we now have searched long enough, if we now have endured long enough—we now have found.
Even 100 years ago, this could have been a really rare way of language. For most individuals, language is a method of getting what they need from the world and from other people. It doesn’t involve an allegiance to the reality. Writers like George Orwell, W. H. Auden, and Victor Klemperer wrote about this.
We see the sequel of the degradation of language they observed in the frenzy toward AI-generated text. Such a shift cannot help but devalue the slow searching for out of truth, the slow searching for out of the correct form with which to precise that truth, in favor of what’s fast, often incorrect, low-cost, and straightforward. It is basically an assault upon the reader’s time and a spotlight. And it is completed, because it was in Orwell’s day, looking for profit, personal advancement, and convenience.
You write in regards to the importance of solitude and courage in creating good art. Why are these so essential to at least one’s craft?
Ultimately, the choices by which we live our lives have to be made individually, each of us for ourselves. Other people can advise us, but there needs to be a moment of retirement, a moment of singleness, once you say, This is how I decide to live, and that is what I decide to stand for. And to make that call without solitude, to make that call in the midst of a crowd, often a shouting crowd, means the chance of taking over the gang’s values, versus living by your personal values, that are almost never found in the midst of the gang.
I believe courage has all the time been a matter of standing apart. Kierkegaard talks about this in one in all his posthumously published writings, “Concerning the Dedication to ‘The Single Individual.’” He writes of the necessity to change into a person aside from the gang, aside from the judgments of those upon whose approval your livelihood, your social standing, or your well-being depend. Courage is the flexibility to say, It will cost me an ideal deal, but I actually have examined the matter to one of the best of my ability, and I cannot do otherwise. It could be very lonely. You should say yes to that loneliness.
