Gloria's Reviews > Silences

A slightly disjointed (and seemingly outdated-published in 1978) overview of the "silences" which overtake nearly all writers at one time or another. And yet, not outdated, in the sense that time knows no boundaries when defining the stealing of one's creativity.

Kafka (who worked as an official in a state insurance agency and wrote when he could) stated it many times:

"These two can never be reconciled.... If I have written something one evening, I am afire the next day in the office and can bring nothing to completion. Outwardly I fulfill my office duties satisfactorily, not my inner duties however, and every unfulfilled inner duty becomes a misfortune that never leaves. What strength it will necessarily drain me of."

"When I begin to write after such a long interval, I draw the words as if out of empty air. If I capture one, then I have just this one alone, and all the toil must begin anew."

The toughest (and lengthiest) part of this book was the section on women writers. Nearly all women writers from the 1800's through the 1900's (of note) either never married or married late. Most remained childless. If they did, they had few in number and all had household help, servants or special circumstances in which they had aid in caring for those children.

I guess this is what frustrated me the most. Unlike a woman author who stated "anyone can breed and rear children, no one else can write my books," I've never felt inclined to pass off my mothering duties (and privileges) to someone else.

And yet, how does one deal with that portion of oneself which can only be buried temporarily and yet rears its head-- demanding air in its own lungs?

I suppose there are more adaptable situations and circumstances which can help foster that creativity-- need. But, frankly, I'm left feeling more akin to these ending quotes by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Anne Porter, respectively:

"Always to be doing work that one did not wish to do, while that one gift which it was death to hide (my writing powers), perishing, and with it, myself. A rust eating away the bloom of spring, destroying the tree at its heart."

"I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted and completely crippled.... In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate. We don't really direct our lives unaided and unobstructed. Our being is subject to all the chances of life."