Who renders vain their deep desire? ???
A God, a God their severance rul’d;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
— Matthew Arnold, “To Marguerite”
Why write? Why read? There are days when it seems that the literary world is like a junior high school lunch table ??? “a culture of jealousy and mean-spirited connivance” ??? and even at the best of times, it’s easy to lose sight of what first brought us to this window on the soul. Like all arts, writing can too easily become about money, career, or fame, a way to hold a mirror up not to nature but ourselves. And yet, every writer, every reader, knows that behind all the posing and sharpening of claws lies an impulse to reach across the empty places between us, to bridge that unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
“Come to the window,” Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach,” that other great poem of severance. “Sweet is the night air!” There may be little hope in that famous final stanza ??? “Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” ??? but I’ve always felt that what’s most human in the poem is that call to his new wife to join him at the window to gaze out across the dark sea. It’s the impulse every writer feels, the summons every reader answers. It’s what makes us hope, even if what we see is hopeless, what makes us human, even if strangers to our own understanding. When we write, it’s not about fame or money or reputation: there are easier ways to acquire those things, simply by enlisting in those ignorant armies. Instead, we stand at the window, and even in that darkness, we see.