It may have seemed, from this year’s entries, as if I’m doling out writerly wisdom from some serene place of Arrived.
If you take a look back at almost any entry from the past couple of years, you’ll see that’s not where I am.
Like everyone else, I’m perpetually on the way — and perpetually looking for some piece of advice or encouragement that can make keeping going seem worthwhile.
I was on the bus today, on my way to the London Library, when I started reading one of the books I was intending to return.
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays & Letters.
I opened it randomly, and found myself in ‘Intellect’.
Every man’s progress is through a succession of teachers, each of whom seems to the time to have a superlative influence, but at last gives place to a new… Take thankfully and heartily all they can give.
I knew almost at once that I’d have to keep Emerson, dammit, because he was saying what I needed to hear.
Exhaust them [these teachers], wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and, after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in our heaven, and blending its light with all your day.
I’m not sure of Emerson’s logic here. Stars don’t shine by day. He seems to be imagining a blazing sky in which every heavenly body, however distant, is shining at once. This — a question of Edgar Allan Poe’s — is apparently about the only contribution a writer has ever made to astronomy. If there are an infinite number of stars, why isn’t the sky white rather than black? (I think it’s something to do with there not having been infinite time for their light to reach us.)
In terms of astrophysics, this may be moot; in terms of arguments about influence, it’s essential.
Emerson is presenting our reading of powerful writer-thinkers as just the kind of agon, or physical struggle, that Harold Bloom theorises in The Anxiety of Influence.
But no writer — not me, not you — needs white out. We don’t need to blind ourselves with all-pervading advice. It’s something a little more lyrical and desperate than that we require. Perhaps like the line from The Band’s song ‘Whispering Pines’:
If only one star shines
That’s just enough to get inside…
And it’s quite possible that you already have that piece of wisdom in your possession, in your memory or written on a 3x5 card, like the one Raymond Carver had, quoting Chekhov:
‘… and suddenly everything became clear to him.’