"[Elizabeth] Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity's a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve. Athletes know all about this nearly hallucinatory state. They call it being in the zone. They feel simultaneously out of body and at one with body."
—Alan Shapiro, "Why Write?"
"Every day includes more non-being than being. Yesterday for example . . . has it happened a good day; above the average in 'being.' It [the weather] was the fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like—there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book—the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette—which interested me. These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton. . . . The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can, and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both."
—Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
"And what happens in protest or civil disobedience, I think ... is that moral questions are temporarily put to rest. Moral ambiguity is resolved; moral tension is diminished. The energies bound up in the tensions of moral doubt are again set free to fill, to power, the self. One finds oneself, simultaneously, at home in both the self and the world. ... The very same feelings of connection or belonging or being fully used and alive that we feel sometimes in solitude or sex can also be experienced in protest or resistance—not as a smug certainty of virtue but as a deepened quality or resonance of being, a sense of being, for the moment, where we belong."
—Peter Marin, "Body Politic"
"A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to relect complexity."
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
—Joan Didion, "The White Album"
Labels: virginiawoolf alanshapiro petermarin mihalycsikszentmihalyi joandidion flow momentsofbeing
