Literary Humility

One of the harder things about trying to be a writer is that so often it seems like I am shouting into a void. Who actually reads this thing? This site is starting to get quite a bit of traffic, but for all I know it's a bunch of Russian hackers. Or, even think of something like the recent publication of Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. The book seems like it's making quite the stir--and for a religious nonfiction book, I think it is--but I imagine I could walk into the bar down the street from my house and no one inside would have heard of the book, the author, or the controversy swirling around it. Even a work that is in the top ten of the New York Times bestseller list is barely going to make a splash outside of the small niche of people interested in such things. Which is kind of bleak, especially for someone like me who will likely never be read much outside of a loving circle of friends and family.

But, worry not, modern writers. This problem is fairly old. I'm reading The Scarlet Letter which I haven't read since I was a junior in high school (which, let's be honest, likely means that I've never read it). The opening chapter, I guess you'd call it, is autobiographical, focusing on a period in Hawthorne's life when he worked as the chief officer at a customs house in Salem, Massachusetts. He had achieved some degree of literary merit before his employment there, mostly riding the coattails of the transcendentalists from what I can tell, but no one in his sphere of influence at the Customs House knew the first thing about his literary career or gave one fig about it if they did know.

Hawthorne took this as an encouragement to humility, which it definitely is. He writes:

It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieve, and all he aims at.

As dour as that can seem, I think it is a good warning to writers to not overestimate our influence. This doesn't mean that writers should stop writing, or that the work is ultimately meaningless. Hawthorne has been dead for a century and a half and he's still outselling most contemporary novelists, after all. But it is proper to recognize that for the vast majority of people the act of writing is superfluous to a meaningful engagement with the world. In the invocation to Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton prays that his work would "fit audience find, though few." This is the prayer, I think, for every writer. That we find the audience that is ready and open to what we have to say. The humility that inheres in the recognition that such a group is likely small is good for one who sets pen to paper or fingers to keys.

I am by no means a Stoic when it comes to life, but I do appreciate their insights on many things. Epictetus once wrote that "to live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals, that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him." Equanimity is a valuable goal for all people, but maybe especially important for the one who, in the words of the philosopher, lives in the presence of great truths and eternal laws. 

Such a rarefied experience of life can easily lead to pomposity, but if we remember that very few people actually give a crap about what we're doing we can be brought back to a level of humility that might actually make us useful both to the people who don't give a crap about us and the very small number that do.