{ Sunday, March 9, 2003 }
From the latest issue of The Paris Review, an interview with Richard Powers.
POWERS: Plowing the Dark started when I heard a lecture by Terry Waite, who told about his five-year captivity in Beirut. After the lecture, he took questions from the audience and someone bluntly asked, "What was the main thing you learned in being locked up for five years?" In the moment after my stomach lurched at the question, I ran through all the possible answers: "Love life while you can," "Never take people for granted again." But his answer was shocking. He said, "Contemporary humanity has lost the ability to engage in productive solitude."
INTERVIEWER: What do you think he meant by "productive"?
POWERS: He wasn't using the term in the way late-capitalistic market society would mean productive. He wasn't talking about General Motors's definition of productivity. The currency he was speaking of is very much the care and tending of individual salvation.
To me, his comment legitimized the process of reading and writing. The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted. It's a threat to the GNP, to the gene engineer. It's an invisible, sedate, almost inert process. Reading is the last act of secular prayer. Even if you're reading in an airport, you're making a womb unto yourself -- you're blocking the end results of information and communication long enough to be in a kind of stationary, meditative aspect. A book is a done deal and nothing you do is going to alter the content, and that's antithetical to the idea that drives our society right now, which is about changing the future, being an agent, getting and taking charge of your destiny and altering it. The destiny of a written narrative is outside the realm of the time. For so long as you are reading, you are also outside the realm of the time. What Waite said seemed like a justification for this unjustifiable process that I've given my life to.
LINK | 4:03 AM | TB
Solitude can be productive, in the GDP way and "artistically". Most people fear solitude more than pain. Enjoying solitude requires going beyond all your fears and concerns. This is not easy. Coming to terms with solitude, with your true self, makes you more productive in every other area of life, including making money and achieving happiness.
Robert Speirs | March 10, 2003 7:01 AMGreat excerpt.
Solitude can be productive in other ways still. One need not read or write to gain advantage from time alone.
Self-reflection is a lost art. People surround themselves with radios and television and cellular phones and with other people so that they never have time alone to think.
Some people do seek time to themselves, but this is spent in the overtly productive exercises of reading and writing. How many people take time to just be alone, thinking (or not thinking).
I'm not advocating any sort of new-age spirituality; only it seems that some measure of personal profit can be obtained from focused self-reflection.
J.D. | March 10, 2003 11:35 AMIt is odd. He defines productive solitude -- as exemplified by reading -- as getting nothing done, not changing the future, being outside the realm of the time.
Perhaps there is some vital piece from the full response missing, elided so as to compel one to buy the magazine (or, more likely, find a good library...). Surely he would say there is some currency by which one profits from reading?
matt pfeffer | March 10, 2003 10:30 PMgush ... i discovered _the_gold_bug_variations_ while i was in the midst of learning to play the goldberg variations and i spent an engrossed night devouring the book. his writing is intricate and layered and tricky and often circuitous, to me, like a really delicious mystery.
leanne | March 11, 2003 5:55 PMHee, and I have *your copy* of it Leanne (which I still haven't gotten around to reading -- nor any of his other books for that matter..)
:)
Caterina | March 11, 2003 6:31 PM{ Post a comment }
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-06-28.htm
here's another interview with powers in the atlantic, re: reading :) "In the end, the book becomes an apology for the virtuality of fiction, fiction not as a replacement for the real world, but as a hybrid place where the real world is suspended and reconstituted into something more survivable."
http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol2is4/horror.html#kilgour
altho kilgour writes, "Reading is therefore eating, an act of consumption. For homo sapiens, to think is to taste, as in the act of knowledge we imagine that we draw the outer world into our minds and possess it." sorta like what harold bloom sez, "We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own."
so i was reading some chapters of atonement yesterday at borders and i thought mcewan-cum-briony's thoughts on whether other people have thoughts and books letting us know that they do (telepathy!) was pretty cool :D
re: productive solitude
a loafer's manifest: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/11.08.01/loafer-0145.html
&
an idler's glossary: http://www.hermenaut.com/a158.shtml
re: powers
http://www.spikemagazine.com/1298powers.htm
http://www.spikemagazine.com/spikegal.htm
i was trying to read some powers' books at B&N one time and didn't find them very good; i think i like what other people say about them better! kinda like dhalgren :D
kenny | March 9, 2003 2:53 PM