The Time is Right Now
At the end of June 1851, Herman Melville wrote to his friend and fellow author Nathaniel Hawthorne, to entreat the other man to visit soon and, most importantly, to complain about his book, The Whale, being unfinished. He complained of the myriad occupations that had prevented him from completing it. He had been building shanties and “plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying.”
This anecdote has lived with me for a long time. There is much to be said about the brief and emotional relationship between the authors of Moby Dick and The Scarlett Letter and there has been much speculation about the nature of those emotions. But I remember being struck first with a sort of jealousy over their correspondence and secondly by the evergreen nature of the complaint.
As to the first, my jealousy since first encountering the story has abated. Were Melville and Hawthorne great writers who knew each other or were they great writers because they knew each other? All such friendly artist relations raise the question. I long suspected that art is easier to make and of better quality when we are in conversation with artists other than ourselves. Writing is such a lonely occupation, a perpetual wrestling with unwieldy words in the vast silence and endless possibility of imagination.
I have had the good pleasure of discovering that having writers to write with and commiserate with does ease the struggle. While I have no metric proof of it, I believe that the work I have made within and with a community of writers is better than the work I produced alone. I am grateful for the opportunity to know other writers and artists and for the way sharing my work and their work helps us to grow.
The second sensation, that the contours of the complaint, if not the language, were ones I had spoken aloud only yesterday, and again today. They are the same complaints I hear from all my writer and artist friends. There is not enough time to make the work I want to make and there are too many other things that need my attention.
And the thing is, it’s true! It was true for Melville and it’s true for us. No matter how much time we have it will always be finite and it will never be enough. If we are very lucky, our work will grow to fill the time we give it; if we are lucky we will always have more ideas and more work than our hands and our minds can address. But the world will not give us the time we need. I think more now than in Melville’s time, the outside world will try to steal our time and our energy. It will always have something for us to do and it will always insist on its importance.
I may not have to plow a field or bring in the hay, but I do have to make dinner and pack backpacks and remember the dentist appointment and take the car in for an oil change. I do have to make a living and move my body and maybe spend time with my loved ones, in those moments when we are not running to soccer practice or meetings.
Then there are the things that I do not have to do that I might like to do, which require even more guarding. I could spend a whole evening on social media or on a new tv show, or both, simultaneously! It could happen without me even noticing, they make it so easy.
But, Melville found time to finish the book, even with the shanties, the plowing, and the other necessary occupations. Though Melville said it was only half done in June, it was published in October of the same year. And I know that he did it the same way that I’ll have to do it and you too, by saying no, by holding himself to account, and by disappointing other people to satisfy himself.
