There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up, “se défendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion. When they dine they must have the same food they get at home. Every sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of their own village. They travel only to return. That is entirely the wrong way to set about it. We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything. Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has no relish unless we share it. As for the risks—that we may catch cold or get a headache—it is always worth while to risk a little illness for the sake of pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales espèces du profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for us. Doctors and wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger’s-breadth from goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death; it is life that matters.
It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul, every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice; carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it slip through one’s fingers, and besides the interest of facts themselves there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too, her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe. Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father loved building. In short, the soul is all laced about with nerves and sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest monster and miracle in the world. “. . . plus je me hante et connois, plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe, observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et sans travail” Montaigne will write.
But there remains one final question which, if we could make him look up from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to this great master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short and broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory statements, we have heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year after year, through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to transparency. Here is some one who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord, husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and mused for hours alone over old books. By means of perpetual experiment and observation of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty of the world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had to live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the nature of the soul? Why this overmastering desire to communicate with others? Is the beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some explanation of the mystery? To this what answer can there be? There is none. There is only one more question: “Que scais-je?”
As some of you know, I am currently writing my first fiction novel. To say that the process has been a difficult journey would be an understatement. In the story, a woman named Jodi fumbles through life making mistake after mistake. Broken and damaged because of circumstances beyond her own control, Jodi wanders through her formative years with a misinformed opinion of herself and others. She is isolated, anxious, heartbroken, and lonely. Like all humans, she seeks happiness, love and fulfillment, but finds merely illusions of this in temporary, vastly shifting, places like islands floating on deep, tumultuous seas.
I didn’t know when I began the book that there would be a point in my character’s life when she had dug herself so deeply into a pit that she couldn’t get out. Every move that she made in a futile effort to escape heaped more dirt and rock onto her head, blocking the light from entering her lonely cavern. There is a moment for Jodi when Love, pure in form and unwavering in its promise, comes down into that hole with her, stands beside her, and begins pulling the rocks off her broken body. In the book, even after our flawed heroine is saved, she remains at the bottom of the pit for some time. She is not alone, and for the rest of her journey out of her despair, Love remains with her.
Writing this novel has been intensely emotional for me, reminding me daily, as I sit down to write, of the pain and loneliness of life before Love breaks through. Many days passed by with my husband leaving home early in the morning so that I could write in complete silence. Hours later, he would come home to check on me, concerned for the darkness that hovered over me like a cloud. To find better tools to deal with the darkness, I went to counseling; it was there that the counselor, in quizzing me about the writing process and the book, asked, “If your character has been saved from her own pit of despair, why keep writing? Isn’t the story over?”
“If your character has been saved from her own pit of despair, why keep writing? Isn’t the story over?”
My answer resounded inside of me like a bell had been struck in my heart. I spoke my truth to her and then went home and wrote it, at twice the pace that I had written the first half of the book. In my story, Jodi must find her way out of her darkness. That takes time for her, and the journey still has many twists and turns. If I had left her at the bottom of the pit, finally in possession of the True Love that she had longed for, my book would be like many fairy tales that have already been written. Jodi’s story will be different because as she fights her way out of her self-imposed prison with the help of Love, she learns the truth and nature of that Love. It is as if, when she depends on that Love for her survival, she learns the depths of its commitment, humility, passion, and sacrifice.
The true story of Grace isn’t always a fairy tale with a sweet, syrupy ending in which all the loose ends are quickly resolved into a pink, satin bow. Royal weddings happen, and our happy ending looms in the distance. However, the best part of the story is when our broken warrior woman and Love slay dragons, overcome villains, and dig out of the mud together.
This morning, as I watched the TobyMac video, I was reminded of Jodi’s moment of redemption. When the old man in the video has fallen to his knees because of being broken by the foolish acts of others, he cries out for Love to save him. I reversed the video and watched it again, looking at the expression on his face. That expression is Jodi’s when she is stranded at the bottom of her grave-like pit with a look of complete desperation and DEPENDENCE. “Help me!” like a baby she cries, he cries…at some point, we all cry. And then, Love breaks through, and we begin the journey out, never to be alone again.
I look forward to sharing Jodi’s story with you. I feel like she is a separate human being that I have created, waiting patiently to be born. Like a mother, I sit down daily to write her, in desperate anticipation of the day that she will finally emerge from the womb. I tally my words, tracking my averages, attempting to determine what day her body will finally be complete and ready to enter the world, to be shared with others. Like every other person who is born into this life, she has a purpose, and I hope that it is to help other people find the Love that can dig them out of their graves.
“The best part of the story is when our broken warrior woman and Love slay dragons, overcome villains, and dig out of the mud together.”