It’s hardly a revelation or insight to point out that a text (or any piece of art) doesn’t always have an easy or straightforward road to its published existence. But thinking about some of the practical things we can take away from this fact is still useful — and I think there are a number of them. I found myself thinking about this matter after working through two long biographies — one on Eugene O’Neil, one on Kafka. Though I wasn’t able to immerse myself in either of them like I was hoping, I nonetheless took away some valuable things: one of them being a more nuanced appreciation for the journey of a piece of art.
To speak of Eugene O’Neil first, it’s well-known that his life was marred with drama and chaos, pain and suffering. His play Long Day’s Journey Into Night shows this to an exquisite degree. It is a masterpiece and undoubtedly one his finest plays. It is also a play he wrote towards the end of his career and after he had already won three Pulitzer prizes. Many have commented that the O’Neil needed all those years in order to write this play. It was a work germinating in his mind for a very long time; it seems as if it really could not have been written any sooner.
As for Kafka, the German writer also had a tumultuous life, which included many problems quite similar to O’Neil’s. A chaotic relationship with his domineering father; serious health issues (Kafka and O’Neil both contracted tuberculosis); and uneven, on-again, off-again personal relationships. World War I was a factor as well, and despite Kafka desperately wanted to join the war efforts, it never happened. His skills in the insurance office where he worked were too valuable. It was an incredibly demanding and time-consuming job (exacerbated by the war) and throughout his life Kafka always had to make a fierce effort to find time to write.
Publishing was no easier of a road, and indeed quite little of Kafka’s work was published during his lifetime. Taking all of this into consideration, it’s interesting to contrast the eventful, demanding, uncertain, and often sickly life of Kafka with the experience of seeing many of his works in handsome editions on the shelves of bookstores. From the nascent ideas Kafka jotted down in notebooks to the short stories and novels that we have of his today, it’s a journey of art at which we can marvel. Indeed, his stories might not have survived — Kafka, in fact, wanted his work to be burned — or been admired by certain people who helped push them toward publication, or perhaps ever been written at all — as sometimes happens.
George Steiner, in his My Unwritten Books, writes of seven books that he had considered writing but, for various reasons, ultimately did not. For Steiner there is a real solemnity to reflecting on these projects. Regarding the weight of an “unwritten book,” he writes that “It is one of the lives we could have lived, one of the journeys we did not take.” It’s a point the reader will come to appreciate in many ways. For even his reflections on these books — the ones that never came to fruition — are so interesting, so insightful and erudite that one can’t help but wonder just how great the finished products of these once conceived book ideas could have been.
___
One of the biggest reasons to abandon or give up on something is when we perceive that there’s no point in continuing. This, at any rate, is my own experience. But whatever the specific reason(s) for giving up, all of us can attest to how extraordinarily aggravating and frustrating it can be to spend time and energy on that which we have come to deem completely pointless. Why, after all, continue a project that has no purpose or meaning? It’s a legitimate feeling—assuming we are thinking reasonably clearly and not being guided by present frustrations, ill-moods, and the like. But even then it’s important to acknowledge two things which seem undeniable.
The first is that we don’t have the convenience of a timeline and the accompanying omniscience to see where we stand in relation to a project. (This seems especially true for artistic projects, given that the making of art is often chaotic and carries on a life of its own.) But in any case, we don’t know our exact relation to whatever it is we are working on. We might, for example, without knowing it, be at a critical point of progress in which long-fermenting ideas are finally, and marvelously, about to be realized and yet it’s at this very point that we decide to give up on the project altogether. And forever.
The second thing to acknowledge is the “simple” fact that we change over time. Passions, interests, commitments, and so on are never static. So while a project might feel dead or pointless now, future events might bring those faded interests and stubbornly inert ideas back to a sparkling life. Similarly, a project that we are eager to undertake at present but which always seems to stall may just need the benefit of a more matured mind.
Spectatio 