The Age of Miracles

It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection. — Voltaire

While reading a collection of essays that have appeared in The New York Times Book Review over the last 130 years, I came across three quotations that I thought could be interwoven if someone were to give it some thought.

Unfortunately, that someone turned out to be me. But here goes.

The first was a contention by Willa Cather in a piece by fellow writer Rose C. Feld that appeared in the 1920s, when the Book Review was beginning to run more in-depth interviews with authors.

“The thing worthwhile is always unplanned,” said Cather, best remembered today for her novels about life on America’s Great Plains, such as O Pioneers! and My Ántonia. “Any art that is a result of preconcerted plans is a dead baby.”

Writers like J.K. Rowling, who mapped out the entire seven-book Harry Potter series on a grid-like master plot before finishing the first novel, or Dan Brown, who spends years researching and building meticulous outlines and chronological grids before writing a single word of his thrillers, would strongly disagree with this.

As would, I suppose, the superb visual artist Georges Seurat, who prepared his pointillist masterworks by making dozens of precise preliminary oil sketches and drawings.

Nonetheless, Cather’s vigorous insistence on the matter impressed me. 

And there are plenty of other famous writers — off the top of my head, I can think of Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, George R.R. Martin and Margaret Atwood — who eschew careful planning and prefer to let the narrative unfold organically, in whatever way the story seems to want to go, after they commence with a simple image, character or premise.

Martin, the Game of Thrones guy, has said that authors fall into two camps: architects and gardeners. Architects like Rowling know where every wire, room and load-bearing wall are going to go before they start to build. Gardeners like Martin plant a seed, water it and watch how it grows.

Whether or not they’re writers, most of the people you know probably fall largely into one camp or the other, though it is of course impossible in real life to anticipate fortune’s unexpected twists and turns.

Having, for example, no idea where this essay is heading or even what I’ll have for lunch in an hour, I mainly fall in with Cather and her clueless, just-go-with-the-flow cohort.

The second NYT observation that stuck with me was quoted by Meyer Levin in his 1952 review Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, seven years after the teen’s body was likely one of the thousands discovered in the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen when British forces liberated it in 1945. 

Between 50,000 and 70,000 people — mostly Jews like Anne and her older sister Margot — died of starvation, disease and unfathomably cruel maltreatment at the Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany.

“I want to go on living even after my death,” Anne had written in the diary she kept while hidden for two years with seven others in a secret nest of rooms behind her father’s place of business in Amsterdam. “I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, the possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.” 

Dutch friends found the diary in the debris after a team of German and Dutch police officers discovered the annex in August 1944, arresting all eight occupants.

The third bit rattling around in my head, also from 1952, was in Eudora Welty’s enthusiastic review of E.B. White’s children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web. 

This was my favourite bedtime book, the one that invariably made me choke up in the sad parts and laugh out loud in the funny bits, when reading it aloud to put our kids to sleep at night. It was dusted off and put back to work when we had grandsons. And I expect to chuckle and weep over the same copy again, in a year or two, when the great-grandchildren get a little older.

You might remember that as she was dying, Charlotte the spider rescues Wilbur the pig from winding up as a pork roast by writing words in her web above his pen — to the astonishment of farmer Homer Zuckerman and the attendees at the county fair where the climax takes place. 

Welty said it better than I can: 

What the book is about is friendship on earth, affection and protection, adventure and miracle, life and death, trust and treachery, pleasure and pain, and the passing of time. As a piece of work it is just about perfect, and just about magical in the way it is done. What it all proves — in the words of the minister in the story which he hands down to his congregation after Charlotte writes “Some Pig” in her web — is “that human beings must always be on the watch for the coming of wonders.” Dr. Dorian (the local doctor) says in another place, “Oh no, I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”

So to return to what started all this: It occurred to me that perhaps these three writers, separated by decades, temperament, nationality, catastrophe and genre, were really talking about more or less the same thing.

Willa Cather says the worthwhile thing is always unplanned. Anne Frank says she wants to continue existing beyond the limits of her own planned biological existence, through her unplanned gift for writing. E.B. White tells us that the very thing we take to be a miracle is only one small miracle nested inside another: the words in the web are astonishing, but so is the web itself. 

We notice the first miracle because it is legible. We overlook the second because we have become accustomed to it. This may be one of the stranger defects of being human: that we tend to call something a miracle only after it has acquired a novel but recognizable shape.

A spider’s web is not news. The inscription “Some Pig” in a spider’s web is.

A spider’s web is something that exists every morning in a garden, an annoyance you brush away from the porch with a broom. But once the spider writes two words in it, we stop seeing the web as a web and begin seeing it as a message. The miracle is not necessarily that something impossible has happened. The miracle may be that, for one instant, we have been forced to see something possible as if we had never seen it before.

This is perhaps also what Cather meant, though she probably would have disliked my saying so. 

Planning is not the enemy of art, obviously. Seurat planned. Rowling planned. Brown plans with the ferocity of an engineer preparing a bridge for an earthquake. There is nothing inherently dead about a plan. 

The danger is that the plan can become so complete that nothing remains capable of surprising the person who made it. And surprise, for the artist, may be the closest thing there is to evidence of life. It’s also where the fun comes in.

You begin with the sentence you intended to write, and somewhere along the way the sentence tells you something you did not know. You invent a character and the character refuses the action you had assigned her. You put a spider in a barn and, because the story requires it, give her the ability to write. You are proceeding according to a plan, perhaps, but the plan has somehow acquired a will of its own.

This is why the distinction between “planned” and “unplanned” may finally be less interesting than the distinction between what we expect to happen and what we are capable of noticing when it does.

Anne Frank’s great act of faith was not merely that she would survive, because she had no reasonable grounds for believing she would. Or that her diary would ever see the light of day after she was taken prisoner. It was simply that the private, hopeful act of putting words on paper might somehow triumph over the dire circumstances in which those words were written.

She was 13, then 14, then 15 in that tiny hidey-hole. The world outside the annex was becoming a machine for turning human beings into statistics, absences, ash, mass graves. And still she wrote as though the self she was discovering on the page might belong to a future reader she could not imagine.

That future reader is one of the miracles.

Us.

The astonishing thing is that a girl writing in hiding could address a future consciousness she would never meet, and that consciousness could, 70 or 80 years later, sit in a quiet room and hear something of her mind moving through the sentences.

The distance is almost absurd. And yet this is what writing does. It creates a peculiar kind of time travel in which the dead are not resurrected, but are permitted to remain present. Not bodily present. Not historically present. Something stranger: mentally present. A mind that has ceased to exist can still alter the mind of somebody who is alive.

The artist’s task — and to me this was Cather’s point — is not to manufacture the miracle. It’s to make the web visible.

And that may be the final wonder: not that the world contains miracles, not that we can survive death physically, but that every once in a while something happens that wakes us from the terrible efficiency of our own expectations long enough to notice that it has. And that this experience can be shared with future generations, if you’re skilful enough in passing it on.

“I want to go on living even after my death.”

“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

Some gig.