Bibliopath #15: In which we make an announcement, vague
Dear reader,
Did I tell you I'm making a podcast? (Making a podcast is the millenial's version of 'Let's start a band', someone tweeted this week.) It's called Topic Sentence, and I ask writers and creatives what their favourite sentence is, and how that sentence shapes their life? Even as I write that, I wonder if there will be enough substance to talk about a sentence for twenty minutes, even as I know that the interviews I've done have been incredibly fruitful.
So far, I've done three interviews, am editing the first, and have a domain name registered and no website yet. When I have more than that, you'll be the first to know.
But this process has brought up this question a lot: "But what's your favourite sentence?"
And the first sentence from this quote is my usual reply:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
It comes from Annie Dillard's The Writing Life. Dillard, if you haven't heard of her, was a spiritualist and a writer of nature, intermingling both in the celebrated and lyrical Pilgrim at Tinker Creek which won her a Pulitzer Prize when she was 29 (!). The Writing Life is, as it sounds, is a book of essays about her process and meditations on creative life.
What kills me about the sentence is those two words in the middle, that jam up the machinery, and make you rethink everything. If the sentence read "How we spend our days is how we spend our lives", it would be unremarkable, a truism at best. But the "of course" breaks the thought where it needs to be broken, cracking open layers of meaning.
The first meaning of "of course" is the most literal—of course how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. We have no other currency, no smaller change to exchange for each passage of time from our lives.
The second meaning of "of course" is the ironic—because we do not often spend time thinking about the way that we spend our days. It's the insanity that keeps us sane (to quote from Neil Gaiman), for if we spent each day marking down the days to our death, we would not truly be spending our days.
The third meaning of "of course" is the final—that we do not often spend time thinking about the way we spend our lives. We are so willing to think of our lives as more than the sum of its parts, that we do not often consider its parts, the way that they total up, the way that one day leads into another to thread together a life.
The final meaning (there may be others) is the realisation, the hopeful message: that in order to change your life, all you have to do is change your day.
And you, what have you been reading this week?
Best,
Guan