Staying Alive: Mary Oliver on How Books Saved Her Life and
Why the Pasion for Work Is the Greatest Antidote to Pain
“There are perhaps no days of our childhood
that we lived as fully,” Proust wrote in
contemplating why
we read, “as the days we think we left
behind without living at all: the days we spent with a favourite book.”And
yet childhoods come in varied hues, some much darker than others; some children
only survive by leaving the anguish of the real world behind and seeking
shelter in the world of books.
Among them was the poet Mary Oliver (b. September 10, 1935),
who recounts the redemptive refuge of reading and writing in her essay “Staying
Alive,” found in Upstream:
Selected Essays — the radiant
collection of reflections that gave us Oliver on the
artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life.
Looking back on her barely survivable
childhood, ravaged by pain which Oliver has never belabored or addressed
directly — a darkness she shines a light on most overtly in her poem “Rage” and
discusses obliquely in her terrific On
Being conversation with Krista Tippett — she contemplates how reading
saved her life:
Adults
can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in
difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and
rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the
ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such
circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing.
Rebecca Solnit, in her beautiful meditation
on the
life-saving vanishing act of reading,
wrote: “I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared
into them like someone running into the woods.” Oliver disappeared
into both. For her, the woods were not a metaphor but a locale of
self-salvation — she found respite from the brutality of the real world in the
benediction of two parallel sacred worlds: nature and literature. She vanished
into the woods, where she found “beauty and interest and mystery,” and she
vanished into books. In a sentiment that calls to mind Kafka’s unforgettable
assertion that “a
book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” Oliver writes:
The
second world — the world of literature — offered me, besides the pleasures of
form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative
capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood
willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees,
clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is
antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness —
the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books
— can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
Oliver approached her new sacred world not
just with the imaginative purposefulness typical of children aglow with a new
obsession, but with a survivalist determination aimed at nothing less than
self-salvation:
I learned to build bookshelves and brought
books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the
night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds,
and the foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and
went to the woods, by day or darkness.
[…]
I
read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I
read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way
too.
In literature, she had her fill of the “clear
and sweet and savory emotion” absent from the reality of her ordinary world,
until reading alone was no longer enough — writing beckoned as the mighty
world-building force that it is. Oliver recalls:
I did not think of language as the means to
self-description. I thought of it as the door — a thousand opening doors! — past
myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise,
and, thus, to come into power.
[…]
I
saw what skill was needed, and persistence — how one must bend one’s spine,
like a hoop, over the page — the long labor. I saw the difference between doing
nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading,
then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of
circumstances — a passion for work.
With an eye to how the enlivening power of
this “passion for work” slowly and steadily superseded the deadening weight of
her circumstances, Oliver issues an incantation almost as a note to herself
whispered into the margins:
You
must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the
responsibility for your life.
Echoing young Sylvia Plath’s insistence
on writing
as salvation for the soul, Oliver takes a lucid look
at the nuanced nature of such self-salvation through creative work and
considers what it means to save one’s own life:
I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are
the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the
years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the
hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning
world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than
bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the
thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a
chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and
with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods,
or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft,
curved universe — that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made
for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.
[…]
And
now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead,
and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I
gathered there lost, or sold — but more books bought, and in another place,
board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all
because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the
blank piece of paper, and my own energy — and mostly the shimmering shoulders
of the world that shrug carelessly over the fate of any individual that they
may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing. And that I did not
give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can
do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness,
to the wild and weedy dunes.
BRAINPICKINGS
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