The most important thing you do

Friday, July 2, 2021

“She considered the day a success because she had perfected a single sentence.”
—a profile of Marilynne Robinson

In his latest newsletter about ambition, Rob Walker quotes an interview with the actor Mads Mikkelsen:

Mikkelsen said that when it comes to work, “everything I do is the most important thing I do.” This seems cryptic, but as he elaborates, it becomes clear that he means he takes each individual professional task he has agreed to perform — large or small, prestigious or obscure — as seriously as he can. And that’s actually distinct from career ambition:

“That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.”

I’ve heard several great filmmakers say something like this.

Herzog: “I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”

Varda: “I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.”

I wonder if this attitude aligns withs the project-based, collaborative, time-sensitive nature of filmmaking: working on one movie, then another, then another.

I also feel it’s worth pointing out that none of the three artists I quoted are American.

* * *

This one-thing-at-a-time attitude can be performed on the macro level, but also on the micro level.

In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about the perils of being ambitious when working on a single piece.

He suggests that writers focus on one sentence at a time, even going so far as to turn each sentence into a paragraph while you’re composing. By putting line breaks in between each of your sentences, you can focus on their length and what they’re doing.

He cautions against getting ahead of the sentence you’re working on:

You’re looking past [the sentence] toward your meaning somewhere down the road,

Or toward the intent of the whole piece.

Somehow that seems more important than the sentence you’re actually making,

Though your meaning and the intent of the whole piece

Depend entirely on the sentence you’re making.

In fact, you’re distracted from the sentence by your intention

And by wondering how soon you’ll be done.

You’re distracted from the only thing of any value to the reader.

For the writer, your career will be the result of whatever piece you’re working on right now, and the piece you’re working on right now will be the result of whatever sentence you’re working on right now.

An intercourse with the world

Thursday, February 21, 2019

“I’ve never planned anything. I haven’t had any career at all. I only have a life.”
—Werner Herzog

A few days ago a woman on Twitter asked me, “Do you find it ironic that your biggest impact has been made not with your art, but your art and writing ABOUT being an artist?”

I immediately thought of W.H. Auden, who died almost half a century ago, but said, “It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.” (He wrote a funny poem called “On The Circuit” about his speaking gigs.)

But to answer the original question: I don’t even think of myself as an artist anymore. I’m a writer who draws. (A title I stole from Saul Steinberg.)

All I ever wanted to do was be part of the world I loved. The world I discovered in books and art and music. I want to be part of it. I don’t care how or in what capacity.

Being a professional writer now means I can be a professional reader. Montaigne said he made bouquets out of other men’s flowers, but he was the one who provided the string to tie them together. I like that image, except bouquets eventually die, and the great thing about books is that they are paper bouquets that never die: they can be torn to their pieces and rearranged indefinitely.

Karl Lagerfield died this week, and he said: “Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.” If books are drugs, then maybe my books are just gateway drugs that lead to better ones. I’m more than okay with that!

But again, what’s the point, here? Why do I even write books in the first place?

It’s just to join in the fun. To be part of that world that I love. To be in a chain that goes backwards and forwards, no matter how puny my link.

Nathaniel Hawthorne said in his 1851 preface to his Twice-Told Tales, that they were “not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart… but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world.” Oliver Sacks snatched this phrase up for his end-of-life reminiscence in Gratitude:

I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and travelled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

What more could you ask for?

Werner Herzog on reading and writing

Wednesday, February 20, 2019

I picked up Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed a week or so ago, and it’s taking me forever to read because 1) it’s 500 pages long and I’m slow, and 2) it’s so dense with insane stories and great wisdom about creative work that I’m constantly stopping to underline sentences.

He describes himself as an autodidact, who “never felt comfortable in school” and “never trusted teachers”:

I’ve always been more interested in teaching myself. If I want to explore something, I never think about attending a class; I do the reading on my own or seek out experts for conversations. Everything we’re forced to learn at school we quickly forget, but the things we set out to learn ourselves — to quench a thirst — are never forgotten, and inevitably become an important part of our existence.

“When he was in school,” his mother says, “Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied, he never knew what he was supposed to know, it seemed.”

But over and over, in the book, and in other interviews, he has one unwavering piece of advice for filmmakers: “Read.”

Read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilization is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.

He gives his Rogue Film School students a “mandatory” reading list and he brings two books with him on film shoots: Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible and Livy’s account of the Second Punic War. (“The Book of Job acts as consolation, Livy gives me courage.”)

He talks a lot about approaching his screenplays with a literary sensibility, often abandoning traditional structure for prose descriptions of scenes. He’s convinced that Conquest of the Useless, his diary of making Fitzcarraldo, will outlive all of his films. “I suspect that my true voice emerges more clearly through prose than cinema,” he says. “I might be a better writer than I am a filmmaker.”

It is a really terrific book.