“…he wondered what it was like to be so weak – not to ride, not to swim, not to care for anything but books and a girl.”
– E. M. Forster, The Longest Journey (1907)

When I found The Longest Journey at a library book sale I had never heard of it, but for $.25 I couldn’t pass up a novel by the author of A Room with a View and Howards End. Besides which, as someone who has been a struggling author for years, this description on the back cover hit deep:

It is the story of Rickie, a sensitive and intelligent young man with a certain amount of literary talent and a modest fortune, who sets out from Cambridge with the intention of writing. His stories are not successful and in order to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes he agrees to abandon his writing and become a schoolmaster at a second-rate public school. This abandonment of personal and real values for those of the world leads him gradually into a living death of conformity and spiritual hypocrisy.

Back cover, 1973 Penguin Modern Classics UK Edition

Amen.
My entire adult life has been a fight between trying to embrace the writing life and having to embrace the mainstream instead in order to survive. A writer not writing is a terror to himself and all those around him, something Rickie learned all too well. And something that, apparently, the non-artist simply can’t understand. It has been the same way with members of my family, friends, and girlfriends. Most Americans embrace the credo that physical possessions are what matter, what give meaning, and what one should strive for. The divide between them and artists/philosophers could not be deeper. As this novel is well over 100 years old, it’s clearly not a modern divide, but one that likely has deepened even further as capitalism has run rampant and invasive advertising tells you everywhere you go that you are not enough, and it’s because you don’t have enough.

“The rest of the year was spent by Rickie partly in bed – he had a curious breakdown – partly in the attempt to get his little stories published.”
The Longest Journey, pg 146

Reaching my 40s, “a living death of conformity and spiritual hypocrisy” is exactly where I found myself. Only unlike Rickie, I also found myself without a career, due to years of taking jobs that, in theory, should have given me the flexibility to write. What I was missing, however, was the stability needed to write. America, especially since 2015/2016 has been built on fear, and when the brain is stuck in fight or flight there is little room for creative thought. That function, not being central to survival (Oh no? It sure as hell is to me), shuts down. So far gone was I that my whole digestive system shut down. If my brain deemed that unessential, you better believe that making up my own little stories was unessential to it, despite what I thought.

As many have said, the world would be great, if not for other people. That’s not strictly true, of course, but I surely understand the sentiment. It’s the near impossibility of the modern world to avoid others when necessary that is the rub, something that didn’t exist in Rickie’s day – no TV screens playing everywhere you go (always advertising something you “need”), no cellphones invading every single aspect of your life. These devices are the absolute worst of all, interrupting thought endlessly until we’re all little more than Pavlov’s dogs, reacting but never thinking. In that state, how can we ever truly create?

The only answer is to prioritize, to shut down everything else, to carve out the time and place, to surround oneself with only those things that inspire creativity and not simply consumption. There is often nothing easy about this. For Rickie and many in the past, it wasn’t that difficult to take a walk in the country. Nowadays, in any built up area, including where I live, such a simple act, done for the whole of human history, can be nearly impossible. There is not one natural area anywhere nearby me where I can do this. We have lost so much and continue to lose more. It hurts every time I go past what was a beautiful grove of trees and is now another nondescript apartment complex. But that is something to another post. For now, one last quote from this novel, which, by the way, Forster said was his favorite among his novels –

“The truth is, I’m changing. I’m beginning to see that the world has many people in it who don’t matter. I had time for them once. Not now.”

Amen. Now let’s go create.