Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope

An Apostate in Academe

41 EJ LEVY






















I’m an apostate in academe, a professor of creative writing who comes to the profession equipped only with faith that in the early twenty-first century universities are America’s latter day Medicis, our patrons of the arts, making it viable to make a life in words. But I’m not a believer. I remain a skeptic among the academic faithful. I wonder sometimes what good is done by carefully crafting stories and discussing them at seminar tables while the world goes to hell; the great performance artist Spalding Gray once quoted an ancient Roman as saying, “And everyone’s writing a book”; we are the Romans, it seems, and we are all writing our books; and I wonder what we have to say that can possibly matter as much as a polar bear in peril because of global warming, a child in the favelas of Rio; I wonder, why write? W. H. Auden famously said in his poem “In Memory of WB Yeats” that “poetry makes nothing happen.” So, why write? In  the National Endowment for the Arts released the findings of a multi-year survey (Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America) which found that literary reading in America is in dramatic decline, with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature. So again, why write? One answer to this question is offered by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in his  Nobel lecture: he said that art is the best bulwark we have against totalitarianism, because it strengthens the individual’s private sense of the world. (Though being Brodsky he put it better than this; he said: “Every new aesthetic reality makes man’s ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics . . . aesthetic experience is always a private one . . . and this kind of privacy . . . can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement.”) An Apostate in Academe CH011.qxd 7/15/09 7:34 AM Page 41 42 EJ LEVY For Brodsky writing itself is an ethical exercise, strengthening the soul: “The one who writes a poem writes it above all because verse writing is an extraordinary accelerator of conscience, of thinking, of comprehending the universe.” Then again, maybe we write because there’s no pleasure like it (poet Elizabeth Bishop famously described that joy as “a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”). Writing, we are lost in thought—or, more accurately, we are found. Or perhaps we write because making art is arguably what makes us human— as anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake argues in her  book Homo Aestheticus, making art is perhaps the principal thing that distinguishes homo sapiens from all other creatures, perhaps the only thing. Other species, after all, communicate, ratiocinate, remember, and regret, but only humans feel the need evidently to draw on cave walls, write poems, and their memoirs. Answers to such a question—Why write?—are obviously as various as writers are, as diverse as their work. The best answer undoubtedly lies in the work itself. But the answer also lies in the working. In the patient practice of noticing and noting down the details of one’s life and those of others, we gently stitch ourselves more tightly to the world. The act of writing restores a conversation with oneself that we are sorely in need of having in our increasingly distracted culture. It’s a kind of communion with the self, which is the foundation for a communion with others and the world. A conversation we’re sorely in need of having. I often tell my students that fiction writing is a sympathetic practice—by imagining our way into others’ lives, we exercise and strengthen our ability to care for and about others, transcending briefly our egoism; writing, we exercise that most important muscle, the heart. CH011.qxd 7/15/09 7:34 AM Page 42 ...