by Eric Maisel
Let’s continue this theme. In what is so far a series of two volumes, A Writer’s Paris and A Writer’s San Francisco, I argued that certain places have a special resonance for writers and that a writing life ought to include those places at least occasionally. You must write where you are, as that is where you are; and wishing you were elsewhere will not help your current novel. But if you can also get away now and then to a place that warms your heart, sparks your mind, and satisfies your longing to travel, you’ll have satisfied a dream and set the stage for some excellent on-the-road writing.
Maybe you’re hoping to spend some time in Greenwich Village, Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona, Berlin, or Tokyo. Maybe it’s Provence, Tuscany, Brittany, the Cotswolds, or the Scottish Highlands. If a place has associations for you, if it excites you to imagine traveling there and writing there, that’s the sort of place I have in mind. Yours may be a traditional choice such as Paris or an idiosyncratic one such as Lyon or Strasbourg. Maybe it’s Seattle, Singapore, or the South Side of Chicago. Maybe it’s a place whose name nobody would recognize, a Texas hill town, an out-of-the-way Louisiana parish. It might be a place with an international airport or a place that can only be reached by a local bus. If it has meaning for you, if something in you is stirred by imagining yourself there, sitting, staring, walking, and writing, that is a place you owe yourself a writing visit.
The main preparations you need to make, in addition to rounding up the money and making your travel arrangements, are internal. You want to go as a writer, not as a vacationer. You could go, soak up the atmosphere, not write anything except journal entries, and have a splendid time; but I’m suggesting something different. I suggest that you actually write when you get there. Sitting in a Paris café with your laptop open and your novel humming is a special way to assert that you are writer, that you are taking your writing seriously, and that you are comfortable writing in public. For this to happen, you need to prepare yourself in the following way: by calling it a writing retreat, not a vacation; by bringing your writing tools and your current project; and by thinking as much about your writing as about your destination.
Your specialty is your own creative spirit; you don’t need to immerse yourself in the history of the place you are visiting. Your stocks-in-trade are yearnings, not train schedules. You may speak nothing but English and fumble your way around strange towns. You may order everything—a room, a sandwich, a newspaper— only with great difficulty. Fine; so be it. Why prepare by filling your head with “Which way to the toilet?” and “Do those snails come with a salad?” when you could be encouraging the unfolding of your novel?
You may not know what you’re doing when it’s time to order or to hop off a train. But you know exactly what you’re doing when you sit on a bench in a small square in Paris or in a tiny Spanish hamlet. You’re meditating on what surrounds you— a boy and a girl in uniform waiting for the school bus, cars half the size of the cars at home angling into parking spots into which they can’t possibly fit—feeling the sun on your forehead, participating in the human experiment in that special way of a traveling writer, and, after a while, opening your pad and writing.
It is that human experiment that you are writing about, the one that produced Moorish architecture, Irish bagpipes, the paintings of Goya, tulips in every conceivable color, strife, complex ideas, simple folk dances, and cobblestone streets that engage your imagination while they hurt your feet. If you weren’t alive to the amazing experiment of which we are each a part, you would travel only for business or to visit relatives. Something inside of you needs to compare one blue sky against another, to walk in the footsteps of itinerant monks and expressionist painters, and to take the measure of our species in small bars where you understand little except the warmth of the bodies around you. That’s why you’re on the road: because the writer in you demands it.
Travel as the writer you are. Planning for a trip is only in part about purchasing tickets and packing light. It is more importantly about opening to your creative nature, readying yourself to be receptive to what you’re about to experience, and selecting an itinerary that serves your imagination, your beauty receptors, and your spirit. It’s saying to yourself, loudly and clearly, “During these two weeks in Italy I am going to outline my Italian novel and come back with a ton of scenes, so many scenes that it won’t even bother me that I put on three pounds from all that gelato.”
The trip begins. You actually bring your laptop, even though that doesn’t feel so festive, and you turn it on as soon as you pass through the security checkpoint at the airport. For that long hour before it’s time to board, you write. No one else is writing; you are already proving the exception. The writer across from you is reading a mystery, the writer down the row is checking her e-mail; you are writing. You board; you take off; you gain altitude; it’s announced that the use of electronic devices is now permitted. The other writers on the plane do not accept this offer; you pull out your laptop and resume writing.
If this doesn’t sound like a traditional vacation, where you leave your work at home, well, it isn’t. It’s a busman’s holiday. A rock climber arrives in the Alps ready to climb. A scuba diver arrives in Aruba ready to dive. You arrive in Budapest raring to write. You skip the museums and the monuments and rush headlong to some grand nineteenth-century café where chess players still gather; you order your Viennese pastry and your espresso; and you begin your lavish busman’s holiday by pulling out your laptop. Let the tourists take stock of the monuments; you have scribbling to do.
LESSON 29
Take the occasional writing retreat, making Paris, London, some Hawaiian black beach, a cabin in Maine, or that bed-and-breakfast across town your writing space for a glorious busman’s week.
To Do
1. Set yourself the task of writing in public. Then do it. This is a good thing in and of itself and also crucial preparation for your writing holiday.
2. Once you’ve mastered writing in public, plan your writing retreat.
3. Take it.
4. Enjoy it!—and remember to write!
Part VIII
Existential Space
CHAPTER 30
The Way of the Meaning-Maker
When our youngest daughter came home from college at Thanksgiving one year she gave me a coffee mug as a present. The motto on the coffee mug read: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” “Isn’t that your philosophy in a nutshell?” she laughed. She was exactly right. “Anonymous” had captured the essence of two centuries of existential thought: that life is as much a responsibility as a gift and that each of us is honor bound to create ourselves in our own best image.
I make my meaning; none exists until I make it. All that exists until I make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning. There is the possibility that I will experience the next hour as meaningful. There is the possibility that I will experience my relationship with my mate and children as meaningful. There is the possibility that I will experience my life as meaningful. If I do not make the meaning that is waiting to be made, I’ll have squandered the opportunity to live life on my own terms.
It doesn’t matter that you have a sanctified study, a fast computer, a great idea, a splendid way with commas, or any other writer’s tool or habit, if you don’t also adopt the mantle of meaning-maker and announce, especially to yourself, that you must create the meaning in your life. Unless you inhabit existential space in precisely this fashion, as a meaning-maker the chances are great that you’ll opt for a respectful silence as you wait for meaning to drop into your lap.
To stand up as a meaning-maker is a revolutionary stance. The groundwork for this revolution has been laid by 200 years of movement toward a single idea: that life can have meaning even if the universe has none. While each of us is limited by circumstances and by our appetites, defenses, and other frailties and realities, we are nevertheless free to choose what meaning we intend to make. This nature has granted us. I get to
decide what will make me feel righteous and happy and so do you. Your life has meaning only when you invest it with meaning.
You are the sole arbiter of the meaning. The second you turn to someone else and ask “What does life mean?” you’ve slipped into a way of thinking that courts inauthenticity and depression. The second you agree with someone simply because of his position or reputation, whether that someone is a guru, author, cleric, parent, politician, general, elder, editor, or literary agent, you fall from the path of personal meaning-making and become flimsy and ordinary.
You and you alone get to decide about meaning. That is the awesome proposition facing every contemporary person. As limited as we are in a biological and psychological sense, we are exactly that free in an existential sense. If we do not live that way, honoring that existential freedom, we get nightmares and panic attacks. If we do not live that way, we find ourselves wishing that we had opted for authenticity and decided to matter. If we do not live that way, we wish we had.
Maybe it is painful for you to think that you are a disposable throwaway in a meaningless universe and that there is nothing you can possibly do to alter that reality. Let that pain go right this instant and announce that meaning can still exist, just as soon as you make some. The split second you do this, all previous belief systems—those that told you what to believe and those that told you there was nothing to believe—vanish. You get to let go of wondering what the universe wants of you and the fear that nothing matters as you proudly announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean. What a triumphant announcement!
To be sure, after that triumphant announcement there you are, exactly where you were the moment before. Has anything changed? Yes, something vital. The instant you realize that meaning is not provided (as traditional belief systems teach) and that it is not absent (as nihilists feel), a new world of potential opens up for you. You suddenly have the philosophical and psychological pillars to support your new meaning-making efforts. You break free of tradition, with its restrictions, demands, and narcissistic bent and set out to make your life a thing of value. You haven’t made it that thing yet, simply by announcing your intention. But you’ve aimed yourself in a brilliant direction: in the direction of your own creation.
This path may not sound all that radical, but it is. It is a radical departure from the traditional path because it blasts all received knowing out of the water. Its central tenet, that you must decide for yourself, is exactly the following announcement: you create your universe from your best understanding of what is right, what is good, and what is valuable. Nothing and no one is allowed to prevent you from deciding what values you intend to uphold and how your righteousness and heroism will play itself out.
It is an equally radical departure from the forlorn postmodern position, which moves from what is likely a fact, that we are throwaway creatures deluded about our own importance, to the unwarranted conclusion that life is not worth taking seriously. The conclusion is unwarranted because it takes a certain thought and a certain feeling, that we do not matter and that despair must follow, and elevates them above an equally available thought, that life can be lived seriously, and an equally available feeling, that of full engagement. You trump nihilism with the amazing announcement that meaning is exactly as available as meaninglessness.
The way of the meaning-maker is a path to make a person proud. You heroically step out into the blinding light of reality, look around, and say, “I am going to do this and I am going to do it for these reasons.” You make the next hour meaningful by investing it with your capital, your intentions, your energy, and your decisiveness. You make the hour after that meaningful in exactly the same way. You do this hour in and hour out, year after year, sometimes sitting and staring, sometimes hugging and kissing, sometimes working ferociously, always for reasons that you deem important. You aren’t a god—you are too earthbound for that. But you are the best human being you can make yourself, the one you had always hoped to see in the mirror.
That is the writer’s existential position, her existential space, her existential shout. She makes the calculation that her best bet is to act as if her life matters and her writing matters, and she seals the deal by actually writing. At the end of the day she is repaid by the feeling that she gave life a bloody good shot.
LESSON 30
Waiting for meaning is a mistake. Seeking meaning is a mistake. Accepting meaning is a mistake. Bemoaning the absence of meaning is a mistake. The only authentic path is to make meaning. You stand up, gather your wits, and exclaim, “I have decided!” Then you clap yourself on the back and get started.
To Do
1. Bring forward a writing project that best resembles “an investment of meaning” and launch into it.
2. Design a “way of the meaning-maker” crest and sew it into all of your clothes. Or, less fancifully, make an effort to educate yourself about which of your projects hold the most meaning for you. Annotate your to-do list of upcoming writing projects with your thoughts about the meaningfulness of each project on the list.
3. Picture the next hour “devoid of meaning” and then picture it “brimming over with meaning.” What did you just learn?
4. Look back (in your mind’s eye) at the writing you’ve done over the past year or two. Can you discern which pieces felt more meaningful and which felt less meaningful? Do the more meaningful pieces share anything in common?
CHAPTER 31
Embracing Tremors
It’s easy to throw up your hands and cry, “I don’t get this idea of meaning-making. How can you make meaning? Either there is meaning or there isn’t. You can’t just make meaning like you can make a convertible or a violin. No, I don’t get it—so I think I’ll pass!” This objection is at once reasonable and fully disingenuous. It is disingenuous because each of us knows in our bones exactly what the phrase “making meaning” signifies. We know perfectly well that it is composed of ideas such as personal responsibility, courage, engagement, and authenticity. There isn’t a thing unclear about it.
However, part of the objection is reasonable—the part where we cry out in pain. What we are objecting to is not the obscurity of the phrase but the nature of the universe the phrase posits. We object to a universe where meaning has to be made. We object to a universe that is meaningless until we force it to mean. We object to nature pulling this dirty trick and making us a partner to it, giving us exactly two choices, to not look this reality square in the eye and live as a coward, or to see what is required and live as an absurd hero. It is not the obscurity of the phrase “making meaning” that disturbs us but what it says about life.
How do we meet the objection that we would like life to be something other than what it is? We meet it with maturity and equanimity. We gracefully accept that meaning must be made, that meaning can be lost in the blink of an eye, that meanings change, and so on. We just stand up—which is exactly what we know we want to do.
Naturally this standing up, though an act of bravery, produces new anxieties. It is like a person in an occupied country bravely deciding to become a partisan—and then realizing what that entails. Isn’t one of our genetic goals to reduce our experience of anxiety? Yes, but that isn’t a goal of our humanity. Our genes tell us to avoid dark tunnels; our humanity tells us to explore them if that’s where we’ll find our writing. Your choice to avoid anxiety at all costs or to embrace the anxiety that comes with living authentically determines how you will live your life. If you decide that reducing your experience of anxiety is your paramount goal, you will never be a partisan.
We lose our taste for roller coasters when we get older. At fourteen, we can’t wait to get on the Wild Monkey or the Ulti- mate Plunge. At forty, we can wait. Likewise, our taste for anxiety does not increase. We mind our grandchildren with an even more watchful eye than we minded our children, we move our money to safer investments, and we take fewer risks and invite fewer heart palpitations. This is the natural way. Still, in order to live
authentically, we must risk anxiety, brave anxiety, embrace anxiety, and invite anxiety every single day. For a meaning-maker, there is no retirement from anxiety.
So make this choice—even though choosing itself provokes anxiety. Meaning-making requires that you make one mindful choice after another. There is no intellectual freedom, no personal freedom, no human freedom without a commitment to lifelong choosing. When a value that means something to you is involved, you must make a choice or fail yourself by not choosing. When work that means something to you is at stake, you must choose to do it or fail yourself by not choosing to do it. You must choose to choose: a day without mindful choosing is a day without meaning.
You must choose even though choosing settles nothing. Our meanings are bound to change as we decide to invest meaning here, remove meaning there, and monitor our meaning investments. New choices—including contradicting yourself from one day to the next—will prove necessary. How unsettling to be for a war on Monday and against it on Tuesday, as our understanding of the situation changes; these are among our worst feelings, having our world turned upside down overnight. Still, we must bravely change our minds and our meanings and make the choices that fit today, not yesterday.
You can manage to live a settled life, existentially speaking, and reduce the number of choices you need to make by adopting overarching positions such as “my country is always right” or “I only write for money.” But you can only accomplish this anxiety reduction at the cost of your integrity. It is much better, although more nerve-wracking, to accept that meaning will never be settled, that meaning is always at risk, and that meaning is a challenge and not a foregone conclusion. Agreeing to this is like agreeing to live on an active fault line. There is no reason why you should agree with a smile and no reason why you should feel sanguine about surviving. But what you lose in safety you gain in authenticity.