On the duty of writers
What is the obligation of the writer to humanity? It perplexes me because some claim that art proper, art in its purest form, exists for its own sake. Which is possibly to suggest that an artist (as a writer can be classified) should be perfectly content if his work remains forever unseen (he is producing art for his own private satisfaction). But this can be a troubling view, for the writer, more than most, has the power to observe the world keenly and make its qualities, good and bad, come startlingly to light. And does there not exist a duty to make people aware? Norman Cousins, for one, says that “There is a need for writers who can restore to writing its powerful tradition of leadership in crisis.”
On talking about mysticism
That the mystic experience is ineffable is a particularly interesting challenge because at the same time so many mystics endeavor to record their experience in words. I was lately writing an essay on The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery Kempe was a mystic whose experience of the divine was rather erratic and given to extreme emotional outburst. Her book is considered the first autobiography in English. She feels a duty to transcribe her experience, and perhaps there is some catharsis in it, but she never describes things quite as she wishes: she overproduces words or underproduces them, and often, she can find no other expression for her love than to cry and “roar.” To render the divine using human faculties is fraught with insufficiency; words are a necessary medium, but they are limited. Scholarship of mysticism must be especially difficult, because the scholastic’s primary form of discourse is the book, and we might say that the mystic scholar must struggle with writing about the unwriteable. And now I am writing about the writing of the unwriteable – what meta-analysis!
On feelings of sadness during penance
It is easy to romanticize melancholy feelings and decide that they are somehow holier or more pious than feelings of joy or indifference (presumably because they involve suffering, a carrying of the cross). Yet it is erroneous to think this way. To be “swallowed up with overmuch sorrow” leads more surely to harm than to purification or mortification, for despair is the ultimate end, and in despair, there is little place for faith and hope and the clear-mindedness to enact charity, or the divine sort of love. To experience sadness in moderation allows feelings of compassion to deepen while keeping an essentially hopeful worldview intact. Penance may involve regret and loathing for sins, but it must always have an element of hope in mind: the chance for absolution and thereafter the chance to live with integrity.