A TEMPLATE FOR GREATNESS
Background: For many years I have been teaching literature at various levels of the ‘education system’. Recently, because of changed circumstances I have begun to give freelance lectures on the great writers. For the last two years I have been lecturing widely on writers of the calibre of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Eliot, Conrad and many more. In the last three months, while preparing the talks, I have been increasingly struck by similarities – not between the lives of the writers which vary widely- but between the processes they go through to get to where they can convey great truths about the human condition. I was so impressed by this similarity of pattern that I looked at over 50 writers and found the same thing. 1) They are all compulsive readers from a very early age and establish a huge bank of knowledge from which they can later draw. They are not only well read in their own country’s literature but in other subjects…philosophy, history, science. They all have a huge hunger to ‘know’. It is a myth that inspiration lands on the unprepared mind! They also all have an awe and a wonder at what is available for them to know. Most of them manage to access the work of the ‘hermetic tradition’…even George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) never ceases to batter at the doors of knowledge until she finds what she wants to know…and that at a time when the knowledge was only available to men. And they never cease adding to that bank. 2) They then are able to select and reject from within the bank what they need, in order to say what they want to say about the human condition in their own particular time and place. There is also a great concern to render ‘truth’ and a responsibility to get it right. The letters to friends, and the evidence in the work, shows they are compulsive about this point. 3) They are able to make a weave of this information in order to hold what is coming into them. Tolstoy and his 140 characters in the 8 separate books which finally make up his novel ‘Anna Karenina’! He is able to hold them all in a web that means they all are able to have an effect on each other. George Eliot and ‘It’s all one web’. Like real life. 4) They share a great compassion for the human condition. They love their characters throughout whatever struggle they give them to endure. Often main characters don’t succeed in that struggle…Hamlet…it’s not whether a man succeeds materially that matters but what he has stood for and what he has stood against. Shakespeare has huge compassion for his character who has the courage to look into what Yeats called the ‘abyss of himself’. 5) They all show tremendous persistence in the face of, often, terrible odds. DH Lawrence has his novel, ‘The Rainbow’, burned by the public hangman. Tolstoy is excommunicated and William Blake is always impoverished. There is in them a consious will to keep going, no matter what. 6) They have great vision and all experience, at different periods in the different lives, deep spiritual illumination as a result of spiritual crises of great severity. Dickens has his at 12 years of age, Eliot throughout her life, Conrad when he is about 30 and is nearly dying in the Congo, and Tolstoy at nearly 50 when he is unable to find God. They all go through what St John of the Cross called a ‘dark night of the soul’. There are many recorded instances of this in letters. In the case of Bunyan and Milton almost the whole work is about the dark night of the soul. 7) After the spiritual crises a ‘knowing’ comes to them that they had been unable to access from searching in books or looking for a ‘brain’ way of explaining existence. And with this knowing comes a firmness of purpose that attends all they do thereafter, and supports their further efforts, so that the whole previous template range becomes deeper and more meaningful with everything else they write. I don’t know, but I’m beginning to see how this could work for all people who achieve greatness in their artistic field..music, painting. It’s certainly true of the poets and novelists I’ve looked at. It all feels so natural and right. It also makes it possible to ‘grade’ writers according to the degree to which the whole 7 stations are in operation. Jane Austen, for example has a very narrow reference field and a limited range of imagination. This is a tiny starter into what could be an immense and totally new way of looking at ‘what it takes’ to render inspiration with devotion and continual effort.
Background: For many years I have been teaching literature at various levels of the ‘education system’. Recently, because of changed circumstances I have begun to give freelance lectures on the great writers. For the last two years I have been lecturing widely on writers of the calibre of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Eliot, Conrad and many more. In the last three months, while preparing the talks, I have been increasingly struck by similarities – not between the lives of the writers which vary widely- but between the processes they go through to get to where they can convey great truths about the human condition. I was so impressed by this similarity of pattern that I looked at over 50 writers and found the same thing. 1) They are all compulsive readers from a very early age and establish a huge bank of knowledge from which they can later draw. They are not only well read in their own country’s literature but in other subjects…philosophy, history, science. They all have a huge hunger to ‘know’. It is a myth that inspiration lands on the unprepared mind! They also all have an awe and a wonder at what is available for them to know. Most of them manage to access the work of the ‘hermetic tradition’…even George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) never ceases to batter at the doors of knowledge until she finds what she wants to know…and that at a time when the knowledge was only available to men. And they never cease adding to that bank. 2) They then are able to select and reject from within the bank what they need, in order to say what they want to say about the human condition in their own particular time and place. There is also a great concern to render ‘truth’ and a responsibility to get it right. The letters to friends, and the evidence in the work, shows they are compulsive about this point. 3) They are able to make a weave of this information in order to hold what is coming into them. Tolstoy and his 140 characters in the 8 separate books which finally make up his novel ‘Anna Karenina’! He is able to hold them all in a web that means they all are able to have an effect on each other. George Eliot and ‘It’s all one web’. Like real life. 4) They share a great compassion for the human condition. They love their characters throughout whatever struggle they give them to endure. Often main characters don’t succeed in that struggle…Hamlet…it’s not whether a man succeeds materially that matters but what he has stood for and what he has stood against. Shakespeare has huge compassion for his character who has the courage to look into what Yeats called the ‘abyss of himself’. 5) They all show tremendous persistence in the face of, often, terrible odds. DH Lawrence has his novel, ‘The Rainbow’, burned by the public hangman. Tolstoy is excommunicated and William Blake is always impoverished. There is in them a consious will to keep going, no matter what. 6) They have great vision and all experience, at different periods in the different lives, deep spiritual illumination as a result of spiritual crises of great severity. Dickens has his at 12 years of age, Eliot throughout her life, Conrad when he is about 30 and is nearly dying in the Congo, and Tolstoy at nearly 50 when he is unable to find God. They all go through what St John of the Cross called a ‘dark night of the soul’. There are many recorded instances of this in letters. In the case of Bunyan and Milton almost the whole work is about the dark night of the soul. 7) After the spiritual crises a ‘knowing’ comes to them that they had been unable to access from searching in books or looking for a ‘brain’ way of explaining existence. And with this knowing comes a firmness of purpose that attends all they do thereafter, and supports their further efforts, so that the whole previous template range becomes deeper and more meaningful with everything else they write. I don’t know, but I’m beginning to see how this could work for all people who achieve greatness in their artistic field..music, painting. It’s certainly true of the poets and novelists I’ve looked at. It all feels so natural and right. It also makes it possible to ‘grade’ writers according to the degree to which the whole 7 stations are in operation. Jane Austen, for example has a very narrow reference field and a limited range of imagination. This is a tiny starter into what could be an immense and totally new way of looking at ‘what it takes’ to render inspiration with devotion and continual effort.