Writing it down: questions and companions

Christian Century, Dec 24, 1997 by James M. Wall

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised a young poet to cherish his deepest questions. Learn to love the questions, he said, and learn to "live the questions." Christina Baldwin cites that advice in her book Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, and she notes that living the questions can be a challenge when the questions are about war, oppression, famine and disease. Personal questions about death, sickness, fear, loneliness, change and defeat are also a challenge. Must we love such things? Yes, because it is by loving and living with the hard questions that we find courage to deal with the darkness.

Baldwin suggests that journal writing can be a spiritual journey because "writing makes a map, and there is something about a journey that begs to have its passage marked." The end of one year and the beginning of another is an appropriate time to start a journal or restart one. A new year is the first year of the rest of our life, and it demands markings, writing that indicates how we deal each day with the questions Rilke would have us love.

I'm encouraged in my own journal writing by reading published journals, even though I am convinced that for most of us the best journal is the one we do not expect others to read. If we imagine someone is looking over our shoulder at what we write, we are tempted to perform for the ages and most likely we will not really look hard at the questions Rilke would have us love. We need to look at those questions and be honest about our anger, puzzlement and despair.

Still, we benefit from reading authors who are willing to write with candor about their own journeys. It is through the experiences of others that we find that we are connected in common quests and common loves. Though the published journal is rarely honest (the author is too concerned about editing himself, and will not look deeply into the darker byways), we can be grateful for even a fleeting glimpse into the lives of others.

Alec Guinness was asked by a publisher to keep a journal during his 82nd year. The result is a somewhat muted but still delightful record from one of England's finest actors: My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor. In Guinness's own words, the news about him is both bad and good. He can, for example, be grumpy with an intruding admirer: "I hate myself today. At Mass this morning I replied abruptly when a woman sat down beside me and asked, knowingly, if I was who she thought I was. I fear I spoiled Palm Sunday for both of us."

On the tenth anniversary of his mother's death, Guinness recalls regretting being rude to a nurse who wanted to talk with him as he sat beside his dying mother's bed. When he rebuffed the nurse's efforts, "she withdrew, hurt and haughty. Oh dear! How I regret myself so often." Regrets are essential in a journal, and chances are, had Guinness been writing for posterity and not for immediate publication, his journal would have contained many more; but I am grateful for the grumpiness he did share.

My Name Escapes Me provides the reader with far more than a sample of regrets. Guinness, whose career includes such diverse films as The Lavender Hill Mob, Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Star Wars, reveals his admiration for performers and artists he admires, and he is candid about those he does not like. "Reread a number of poems from John Updike's collection, Facing Nature. He is provocative and stimulating. There can't be many better novelists alive and yet it is somehow surprising to realize what a good poet he is." To which I wanted to respond, Right you are, Alec.

Guinness is overjoyed when he receives a copy of Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies, which, he writes, "I find hard to put down. Much of it is densely written and sometimes, perhaps, over-detailed, and yet it is often his minute observations that take one's breath away. It seems to me he always sees the truth of things and expresses that truth brilliantly. Can there be another novelist of equal stature writing English today?" You're absolutely correct, Sir Alec.

If I could continue my imaginary conversation with Sir Alec, I would tell him about the recently published Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma, by Mary O'Connell, who argues that Updike is not nearly as misogynistic as many critics say he is. In a careful reading of Updike's Rabbit series, O'Connell says that far from endorsing Rabbit's stunted masculinity, Updike actually challenges the conventional image of masculinity and laments the damage that this image causes men and women. I know that book would delight Alec Guinness because it delighted me, and now that I have read his journal I know the points at which we think alike.

Candid journals reveal people as they are. Let me cite a recent passage in my own journal, not written for publication, which will stand the light of day: "Turned on the faucet to get hot water for shaving, ran to the computer to check e-mail. Message came while on line. Had fun responding; then remembered the running water. What a waste. Must atone. Will shorten showers this week to make up for water loss. Not much atonement, but a start. Can't write about global warming and keep wasting water. Apologized to the water I wasted. Find myself speaking more and more these days to natural things, usually apologizing. Good thing people don't hear me."