 | | eyes quicker to see than ours, delicate or grand lines in the homeliest things. . . . Everything she saw or touched, nearer, more human than to you or me. These sights and sounds did not come to her common; she never got used to living as other people do.
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She never got used to living as other people do. Was that one of the ways it was?
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So some of the silences, incomplete listing of the incomplete, where the need and capacity to create were of a high order.
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Now, what
is
the work of creation and the circumstances it demands for full functioningas told in the journals, letters, notes, of the practitioners themselves: Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, Virginia Woolf; the letters of Flaubert, Rilke, Joseph Conrad; Thomas Wolfe's
Story of a Novel,
Valéry's
Course in Poetics.
What do they explain of the silences?
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''Constant toil is the law of art, as it is of life," says (and demonstrated) Balzac:
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| | To pass from conception to execution, to produce, to bring the idea to birth, to raise the child laboriously from infancy, to put it nightly to sleep surfeited, to kiss it in the mornings with the hungry heart of a mother, to clean it, to clothe it fifty times over in new garments which it tears and casts away, and yet not revolt against the trials of this agitated lifethis unwearying maternal love, this habit of creationthis is execution and its toils.
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"Without duties, almost without external communication," Rilke specifies, "unconfined solitude which takes every day like a life, a spaciousness which puts no limit to vision and in the midst of which infinities surround."
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Unconfined solitude as Joseph Conrad experienced it:
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| | For twenty months I wrestled with the Lord for my creation . . . mind and will and conscience engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day ... a lonely struggle in a great isolation from the world. I suppose I slept and ate the food put
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