The Marginalian
The Marginalian

True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again

By Maria Popova

True Love Will Find You in the End: Kurt Vonnegut on When to Stop Trying and When to Try Again

Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wondering how the trees and shrubs know when to stop, how far to keep pushing, where the point is past which the conditions become too inhospitable for growth, for flourishing, for survival.

This may be the hardest equation to balance in all of existence: when to keep trying and when to stop. Nowhere is it more confounding, because nowhere is the calculus of reason more haunted by emotion, than in our intimate relationships. There, all the variables are too charged with feeling to be weighed accurately; there, the most vulnerable part of the ego keeps factoring itself into the arithmetic. Because time is something we can measure and tenderness is not, we keep trying to ward off the singular sense of personal failure that the loss of love can bring by measuring the success of a relationship by quantity of time rather than quality of being, only to find ourselves on barren rock.

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922–April 11, 2007) was twenty-two and just home from his wartime duty in Europe, where he had been held as a prisoner of war in Dresden and barely survived the Allied bombing of the city, when he married his college classmate Jane Marie Cox — two young people not yet having become themselves, unformed and unhealed, trying to be together.

They loved each other, but as they grew up, they grew apart, grew askance. And yet, dragged by the momentum of culture, they had a son, then a daughter, then another as Vonnegut struggled to make a living as a writer.

Vonnegut at 33 with his family.

When his sister died of cancer two days after her husband was killed in a train accident, he adopted their three young sons. In that way life has of denying us any alternative experimental condition but our lived experience, no one knows what might have become of the couple in an experimental design other than a small house pattered by six hungry children. They fought more and more, until even the most mundane conversation couldn’t but become an argument.

Vonnegut tried to take refuge in writing, but his twin peaks of bills and rejection slips came to tower over his dream. Middle-aged and penniless, he was about to give up when he received an unexpected offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, procured through the kindness of a single reader touched by the work of this obscure unhappy writer. It was a lifeline both professional and personal. Vonnegut packed his bags and headed to Iowa, knowing in his heart, though he was not yet ready to allow the thought, that this was the end of his life with Jane.

Two years into teaching, as his writing was finally beginning to receive recognition, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and used the prize money to travel back to Dresden, only to find much of the city still in ruins. I wonder if he thought about love then, how it too is a world that can be left in ruins beyond repair if the warfare is too brutal or too long.

Suddenly catapulted into public success — after five novels and countless short stories, Vonnegut was lauded as an overnight success with Slaughterhouse-Five — he remained lodged in the pit of personal failure. He and Jane had been together for a quarter century, happy for only a fraction of it. Torn between his emotional inability to hold on to the relationship and his cerebral unwillingness to give up, he began drowning his discontent in drink.

In the last year of his forties, he moved out and headed for New York, but couldn’t bring himself to end the marriage. Taking solace in Margaret Mead’s assurance that “a couple which has had children has an irreversible and undissolvable relationship,” he wrote to Jane:

We hurt each other back and forth so much, almost absent-mindedly, that it was common sense for us to separate, if only to break the rhythm.

He shaded in this stark contour in a letter to a friend, painting a haunting portrait of a dead relationship:

I myself am living alone in two rooms and a garden in New York, attempting to draw useful electricity from the millions of milling strangers around me. I am no longer living with Jane for this reason, as nearly as I can tell: We are no longer capable of conducting amiable conversations. When we try to talk, to amuse each other and pass the time, our words are wooden, stilted, queer, distant, and — finally — quietly bitter. That is too bad, and many people regard me as heartless for leaving her. But the hours and days and years dragged so. I am happier now, though far from hilarious and proud. I have achieved a sort of Limbo, which is a distinct improvement over what I had before. I am beginning to write again. That had stopped for a while. I do not wish to marry again. I’m not in love with anybody else.

Kurt Vonnegut at 50.

Writing remained his one oasis of sanity amid the limbo of his Middle Passage. Some part of him — that wise part that lives in each of us, whispering what we don’t want to but need to hear — knew that he had to reimagine his life if he were not to squander it. But he was not ready. So he reimagined his writing, taking the skeleton of a play he had written fifteen years earlier and enfleshing it anew. Happy Birthday, Wanda June ran for five months to mixed reviews, but the world was finally paying attention.

Having documented Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic speech during the March on Washington and worked as a war photographer in Vietnam, Jill Krementz was unperturbed by the cantankerous writer whose process she was hired to capture for a magazine profile. She immediately felt both Vonnegut’s brilliance and his brokenness, felt the sharp edge on which his own heart was breaking, saw to the roiling core of his wounded tenderness. He immediately decided he didn’t like her. (“There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson shuddered at the discomposing intimacy that bloomed between him and Margaret Fuller.)

Within months, they were living together.

Just before he moved in with Jill, Vonnegut wrote to his seventeen-year-old daughter Nanette:

Dear old Nanny —

You certainly deserve a letter from me. A hundred letters would be more like it, I love you so.

I will be home from time to time to see you. But I will not stay for long. I still love your mother, but we can’t be together much without fighting. We have tried to do things about this, but nothing helps, and each fight hurts more than the last one.

I wasn’t stolen away by another woman. I don’t think people can steal other people. I simply went away because the fighting was making everybody so unhappy. I’ve done that several times before. Going to Iowa was an example. Every time I went away I simply went to aloneness. There was never any other woman beckoning me to come.

This time, for instance, I couldn’t make myself come home after the play opened, and I was alone. I hardly knew Jill at all, and I didn’t like her much, and whatever happened between us happened long after I’d decided home was too uncomfortable for me.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.

Eighteen years his junior but in many ways his spiritual elder, Jill enveloped him in a kindness so entirely new he didn’t know what to do with it, a love he hadn’t thought possible. He tried to fight with her, out of reflex, but she simply loved him, and so he slowly unbraced the oppositional stance that had become his default, slowly stopped self-medicating. He grew healthy, grew happy, grew himself.

Still, it took him six years to meet the emotional truth of his failed marriage with the hard fact of divorce. When he finally decided to do it, he wrote to Nan:

As for the divorce: I will always love your mother, as must have been evident on Sunday. But we could never live together again. Our conversations go so badly. Also: I want to be fair to Jill, who saved me from knocking myself off or turning into an alcoholic. I will not marry Jill, but I will stop asking that she live with a married man. And Jane, who is fond of marriage, should have the chance to marry again. I am not pursuing happiness through divorce. I am permanently damaged by the break-up of marriage. Those wounds will never heal. I am simply trying to make the best of an unpleasant situation. Let me say again, too, that Jill did not break the marriage. It was broken long before that — about the time I went to Iowa. There was no other woman beckoning me to Iowa. Later on, there was no woman beckoning me to New York City. I arrived both places in total solitude, and feeling simply awful.

There will be no acrimonious argle-bargle about divorce this time. We will not make the mistake of hiring two strangers to fight each other on our behalf. Jane and I will arrive at some sort of division of property, and some scheme for my sending her money regularly. She already owns the Cape house and some stocks and a large savings account in cash. I will add to that treasure, so she won’t have much to worry about as long as I’m popular and productive. Then Don Farber will draw up a simple agreement, and that will be that. The legal steps will be brief formalities, without any arguments to be made before a judge.

It took him another two years to formalize his relationship with Jill. By the time they decided to marry, he was fifty-seven and one of the most beloved authors in America. His daughter was the first person he told:

Dearest Nanny —

I want you to be the first person in our family to find this out: That Jill and I have decided to marry each other in November, probably a couple of days after Thanksgiving. Jill will then be three months shy of being forty, and we will have lived together about nine years. The first years of the relationship were tempestuous. Much of the tempest was my fault, surely. I was in a frenzied state of mourning and dismay over the failure of my once good marriage to Jane. Jill had nothing to do with that failure, but she was handy to blame. Be that as it may, Jill and I behave most affectionately and reasonably toward each other now, and unselfishly. We are in love. Our heads are clear. We are working and playing most cheerfully.

I do not endorse serial marriage for anyone. I myself have always wished to be as monogamous as a swan. I was monogamous with your mother until the very end, and will be so with Jill.

After a rough sketch of the wedding (“It will be very private. We don’t want our pictures in the paper.”), he added:

I sympathize fully with the mixed loyalties you and all the rest of my children would feel on such an occasion. So I of course invite you all, and hope you all will come. If the ceremony and party are going to cause you pain, you should not subject yourself to that pain. Your coming or staying away will not be a vote for or against anything.

Mostly, dear Nanny, I want you to know how happy I am just now, and that I have every reason to look forward to some very good years ahead.

Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz a decade into their love. (Photograph: Adam Scull.)

Kurt and Jill remained together until his death, thirty-six years after they met. It was there, in the safety and sweetness of their love, that he discovered the simple secret of happiness.

BP

Georgia O’Keeffe on What It Means to Be an Artist

By Maria Popova

Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986), celebrated as America’s first great female artist, was a woman of strong opinions on art, life, and setting priorities and an uncommon gift for committing to words what she committed to canvas. But some of her most revelatory insights on art and the creative experience were shared in a series of letters to writer Sherwood Anderson, who had befriended legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz — O’Keeffe’s husband and her correspondent in volumes of passionate love letters. Encountering O’Keeffe’s art in the early 1920s had inspired Anderson to pick up the paintbrush for the first time and begin painting himself. Meanwhile, the two developed an epistolary fellowship around their shared ideas about art and their amicable intellectual disagreements. (Only three years later, Anderson would come to articulate his own unforgettable wisdom on art in a letter to his son, very likely influenced by O’Keeffe and their creative rapport.)

Found in Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters (public library) — an altogether unputdownable out-of-print volume released in 1987, a year after O’Keeffe’s death, to mark her centennial — the letters stand as a sublime paean to the kind of creative integrity that rises above public opinion and blazes with crystalline clarity of conviction. At the same time, one can’t help but wonder how O’Keeffe’s art — how her sanity — might have suffered had she lived in our present era of perpetual sprinting on the social-media hamster wheel of public opinion.

Georgia O’Keeffe by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918

On August 1, 1923, she writes to Anderson:

This morning I saw an envelope on the table Stieglitz addressed to you — I’ve wanted so often to write you — two things in particular to tell you — but I do not write — I do not write to anyone — maybe I do not like telling myself to people — and writing means that.

First I wanted to tell you — way back in the winter that I liked your “Many Marriages” — and that what others have said about it amused me much — I realize when I hear others speak of it that I do not seem to read the way they do — I seem to — like — or discard — for no particular reason excepting that it is inevitable at the moment. — At the time I read it I saw no particular reason why I should write you that I liked it — because I do not consider my liking — or disliking of any particular consequence to anyone but myself — And knowing you were trying to work I felt that opinions on what was past for you would probably be like just so much rubbish — in your way for the clear thing ahead — And when I think of you — I think of you rather often — it is always with the wish — a real wish — that the work is going well — that nothing interferes —

I think of you often because the few times you came to us were fine — like fine days in the mountains — fine to remember — clear sparkling and lots of air — fine air.

After a characteristically evocative note about Stieglitz’s health that spring had rendered him “just a little heap of misery — sleepless — with eyes — ears — nose — arm — feet — ankles — intestines — all taking their turn at deviling him,” O’Keeffe expresses deep gratitude for the very thing that led Virginia Woolf to term letter writing “the humane art” — the soul-salving power of a letter sent by one human being to another:

You can see why I appreciated your letters — maybe more than he did — because of what they gave him — I don’t remember now what you wrote — I only remember that they made me feel that you feel something of what I know he is — that it means much to you in your life — adds much to your life — and a real love for him seemed to have grown from it

And in his misery he was very sad — and I guess I had grown pretty sad and forlorn feeling too — so your voice was kind to hear out of faraway and I want to tell you that it meant much — Thanks

Aware of misfortune’s one-way mirror of hindsight, she adds, “I can only write you this now because things are better.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

O’Keeffe and Anderson continue their correspondence and in another letter sent a month later, she defies her self-professed distaste for “telling [herself] to people” and instead divulging — with the exhilarating intensity of expression that both her art and her letters to loved ones emanate — a magnificent glimpse of her inner life and creative spirit. She considers the role of form in art and the experience from which art stems:

I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown — where it has experienced something — felt something — it has not understood — and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown — known. By unknown — I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down — clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand — sometimes he partially knows why — sometimes he doesn’t — sometimes it is all working in the dark — but a working that must be done — Making the unknown — known — in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing — if you stop to think of the form — as form you are lost — The artist’s form must be inevitable — You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed — Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant — there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you — catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life — only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead — that you must always keep working to grasp — the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear.

In a remark of extraordinary humility and wisdom, especially in the hindsight of both O’Keeffe’s present status in the canon of art and Anderson’s in that of literature, she considers the feebleness of any present metric of success against a creator’s ultimate significance for posterity:

You and I don’t know whether our vision is clear in relation to our time or not — No matter what failure or success we may have — we will not know — But we can keep our integrity — according to our own sense of balance with the world and that creates our form —

In a sentiment that calls to mind Maurice Sendak’s famous dissent with a common classification of his work — “I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” — O’Keeffe adds:

What others have called form has nothing to do with our form — I want to create my own and I can’t do anything else — if I stop to think of what others — authorities or the public — or anyone — would say of my form I’d not be able to do anything.

I can never show what I am working on without being stopped — whether it is liked or disliked I am affected in the same way — sort of paralyzed — .

All of Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters is a treat for eye and spirit alike. Complement this particular bit with Anna Deavere Smith on how to stop letting others define us and Rilke on why external interference in the artist’s private experience poisons the art.

BP

Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts

By Maria Popova

Kafka’s Approach to Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Gifted from Living Up to Their Gifts

The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.

This is why I love diaries, with their rare glimpse of the inner worlds that lavish our own with beauty and truth, with nourishment of substance and sweetness that endures for epochs after the lives that made it are no more.

Of all the writers and artists who have kept a journal as a means of creative catalysis and a salve for self-doubt, no one has confronted the internal saboteur of creativity — those psychic hindrances that stand between the talented and the fruition of their talent — more pointedly than Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924).

Franz Kafka

“I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can,” he vows at the outset of his Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal that became part creative sandbox, part metronome of discipline, part exorcism for self-doubt as Kafka was trying to live into his creative calling while working as an insurance salesman. “I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead,” he declares, and yet over and over he indicts himself for falling short of his desire, for thwarting his talent with insecurity and lack of discipline. “Wrote nothing,” he laments in entry after entry. “Have written nothing for three days,” he sulks as his creative block consumes him. “Bad,” he declares a perfect spring day for having produced no writing. By early summer, he is in despair:

Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already. The nervous states are beginning. But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.

The reasons for Kafka’s creative block are various: By turns he finds himself drowning in loneliness, enraged by distraction, physically fatigued and pained by the tuberculosis that would soon take his life, tortured by his era’s version of an overflowing inbox: heaps of unanswered letters. He feels his powers being wasted, feels himself “wretched, wretched, and yet with good intentions,” feels the “absolute despair” of trying and failing to write. The diary itself becomes his watering hole through the dry spells:

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

On its pages, universal patterns emerge: In his private and particular turmoils, Kafka touches again and again on what I consider the four great perils standing between us and our gifts — those psychic hindrances of which we may not always be consciously aware, but we which experience palpably and painfully as creative block.

Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s, included in Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)
4. TIME-ANXIETY

Savaged by shame at his writing, Kafka regularly winces at his sentences, then reasons:

I explain it to myself by saying that I have too little time and quiet to draw out of me all the possibilities of my talent.

Baldwin would have had something to say about that excuse, which Kafka himself sees crumble: During a rare respite from his ordinary time-lament — that his day job at the insurance company is taking too much energy away from writing — he finds himself not using the windfall gain to write:

This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse… Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy.

Such is the bi-polar nature of time-anxiety in creative work: Alongside the feeling of not having enough time is also the time-dilating experience of procrastination — the paradoxical paralysis many gifted people feel at the prospect of living up to and into their gifts. Kafka writes:

Idled away the morning with sleeping and reading newspapers. Afraid to finish a review for the Prager Tagblatt. Such fear of writing always expresses itself by my occasionally making up, away from my desk, initial sentences for what I am to write, which immediately prove unusable, dry, broken off long before their end, and pointing with their towering fragments to a sad future.

“Wasted day,” he groans in another entry. And yet he has the wisdom to recognize that procrastination — “the shameful lowlands of writing” — has a purpose:

Stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, ‘I’ve been writing until now.’ The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in… I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.

Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace
3. WORLD-ANXIETY

To be an artist is to feel life deeply, to tremble with the terrors of everything that trembles. As the first global war is painting the world around him black, Kafka sinks into an inner darkness, his anxiety rising to untenable heights:

The thoughts provoked in me by the war… devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it.

The writing stalls again as he sorrows with the world’s sorrow:

Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing.

Kafka would die of tuberculosis while the war is still raging.

One of Harry Clarke’s haunting 1925 illustrations for Goethe’s Faust
2. SELF-COMPARISON

Few things maim an artist’s confidence more savagely than self-comparison, which breeds the two most pernicious species of despair in creative work: insecurity and envy, always entwined in a singularly damaging form of learned helplessness. While working on what would become his first published short story, Kafka acquires a volume of Goethe’s conversations and finds himself completely blocked:

So passes my rainy, quiet Sunday, I sit in my bedroom and am at peace, but instead of making up my mind to do some writing, into which I could have poured my whole being the day before yesterday, I have been staring at my fingers for quite a while. This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.

Nearly a month later, he is still immersed in and paralyzed by Goethe. After yet another “wrote nothing,” he records:

The zeal, permeating every part of me, with which I read about Goethe (Goethe’s conversations, student days, hours with Goethe, a visit of Goethe’s to Frankfort) and which keeps me from all writing.

Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat
1. SELF-DOUBT

“I cannot believe that I shall really write something good tomorrow,” Kafka forebodes in one entry. In another, he declares himself “an almost complete failure in writing.” He is torn between determination and despair:

I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled — without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion — to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.

With his characteristic drama for metaphor, he writes in the winter of his twenty-eighth year:

It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other… My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odour of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face.

Toupet tit / Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Like Audubon did with his bird paintings, Kafka regularly destroyed writing that dissatisfied him. With an eye to all he disavowed one particular year — a great deal more writing than he kept — he is suddenly seized by anxious self-doubt:

That hinders me a great deal in writing. It is indeed a mountain, it is five times as much as I have in general ever written, and by its mass alone it draws everything that I write away from under my pen to itself.

Preparing to visit his siblings and parents, and heavy with shame for having written nothing, he consoles himself grimly:

I shall, since I have written nothing that I could enjoy, not appear stranger, more despicable, more useless to them than I do to myself.

When his best friend does a reading of one of Kafka’s stories at a salon, Kafka finds himself feeling bitterly “isolated from everyone,” chin down in shame at the “disordered sentences” of his “story with holes into which one could stick both hands.” He agonizes:

If I were ever able to write something large and whole, well shaped from beginning to end, then in the end the story would never be able to detach itself from me and it would be possible for me calmly and with open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read, but as it is every little piece of the story runs around homeless and drives me away from it in the opposite direction.

He feels unable to write, and the little he does write feels “wrong.” In yet another dramatic metaphor — “metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing,” he would later rue — he reflects:

My feeling when I write something that is wrong might be depicted as follows: In front of two holes in the ground a man is waiting for something to appear that can rise up only out of the hole on his right. But while this hole remains covered over by a dimly visible lid, one thing after another rises up out of the hole on his left, keeps trying to attract his attention, and in the end succeeds in doing this without any difficulty because of its swelling size, which, much as the man may try to prevent it, finally covers up even the right hole. But the man — he does not want to leave this place, and indeed refuses to at any price — has nothing but these appearances, and although — fleeting as they are, their strength is used up by their merely appearing — they cannot satisfy him, he still strives, whenever out of weakness they are arrested in their rising up, to drive them up and scatter them into the air if only he can thus bring up others; for the permanent sight of one is unbearable, and moreover he continues to hope that after the false appearances have been exhausted, the true will finally appear.

And then, swift as a whip, his self-doubt meta-flagellates the metaphor itself:

How weak this picture is. An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.

He doubts not only his talent but his motivation to manifest it:

I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.

Within months, he had published The Metamorphosis. And this indeed is the great consolation of his diaries: Over and over, Kafka discovers — as every artist eventually must — that the remedy for writer’s block is writing. A generation before Steinbeck observed in his own diary of self-doubt that “just a stint every day does it,” Kafka writes with an eye to the 1911 comet visible in the night sky above him:

Every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets… Then I should appear before that sentence once, lured by that sentence.

Over and over, he discovers that he writes to save himself:

I feel helpless and an outsider. The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful.

He discovers that writing, for him, is not a matter of art but of survival:

I have now… a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely. This is no artistic yearning.

At its best, it is not merely survival, not salvation, but self-transcendence:

Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.

[…]

I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.

He relishes “the strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing… a seeing of what is really taking place.” What buoys him through all the doubt and despair is the deeper knowledge — a kind of profound self-trust — that writing is his calling, the great spiritual reward for which he would give up — and did give up — every earthly pleasure:

When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even half-way serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely. In any case I shouldn’t complain that I can’t put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I do of music.

[…]

My development is now complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which, with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.

Complement with Bob Dylan on sacrifice, neuroscience founding father Santiago Ramón y Cajal on the six “diseases of the will” that keep the talented from reaching greatness, and the story of how Steinbeck used his diary as a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt (that eventually won him the Pulitzer and paved the way for his Nobel), then revisit Kafka on the nature of reality, the power of patience, and his remarkable letter to his narcissistic father.

BP

Diatoms and the Meaning of Life

By Maria Popova

In 1703, the world’s most esteemed scientific journal published a surprising letter from an anonymous correspondent. (At the time, until well into the twentieth century, anonymity often meant the scientist writing was a woman, though the word “scientist” itself was more than a century away, to be coined for a woman.)

The letter reported an astonishing discovery in the roots of pond plants placed under a microscope, still a relative novelty: Adhering to the delicate aquatic stalks were “many pretty branches, compos’d of regular oblongs and exact figures… the longest side not exceeding 1/2 of a hair’s breadth” — mysterious beauties smaller than any life-form anyone had seen, and yet appearing to be more than inert matter. “They may be rather Plants than Salts,” the shy scientist speculated shyly, but concluded that “they being so very minute that no judgment can be made of them but by the Eye,” it is impossible to “determine any thing positively.”

These beguiling marvels — tiny stars and fans and ribbons organized along exquisite radial and lateral symmetries — confused Darwin when he encountered them a century and a half later in the dust of the Cape Verde Islands and in the face paint of the native inhabitants Tierra del Fuego. All he managed was to gasp that “few objects are more beautiful,” seemingly “created that they might be examined and admired under the high powers of the microscope.”

Modern micrograph of diatoms (NOAA)

Today, we know that diatoms — thousands of species of unicellular algae, each a living Noether theorem housed in a shell of opal — are not created for admiration but create the admirer: Every life-form on Earth depends on them. Tiny powerhouses of photosynthesis populating every body of water, these phytoplankton generate close to half of our planet’s oxygen, pillar its biomass, and absorb the atmospheric carbon dioxide that dissolves in the ocean.

To know of this extraordinary power makes the delicate beauty of diatoms all the more beguiling — nowhere more so than in Diatom Atlas by the German naturalist and clergyman Adolf Schmidt (1812–1899), who spent the better part of his life sampling cells from all over the world — Japan to Chile, Java to Barbados — to compose his pioneering portrait these miniature masterpieces of evolution.

Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)

Originally published in 1874 in black and white, the atlas was later reproduced on blue paper — a medium that originated in ancient China, then made its via the Middle East and Spain to Renaissance Italy to be used as a base for drawing and prints, giving two-dimensional artwork a hauntingly beautiful three-dimensional quality.

Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)
Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)
Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)
Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)
Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)

“I died for beauty,” Keats wrote with the requisite melodrama of the Romantics. Diatoms are a dazzling defiance of this aesthetic nihilism, urging us to remember that we are here to live with beauty. They could have remained mere producers of chemical energy no handsomer than a factory, and yet here they are, living jewels of the blue world. Pulsating beneath their shimmering shells and mathematically perfect symmetries is the elemental question: Why did the world have to be beautiful? And beneath that still, the eternal answer: No why; just is.

Art from Diatom Atlas by Adolf Schmidt, 1890 edition. (Available as a print and more.)
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