Not think, but THINK.
Three authors, three books, in three times two days of reading:
- THEN AGAIN by Diane Keaton
- EVENING by Susan Minot
- Madeleine L’Engle {Herself}, Reflections on a Writing Life.
How can a memoir, a novel, and a book of compilations on the writing life, intended to instruct and inspire — as different as they could be by the look of their covers — be so united in their thinking?
What am I to make of this? Had the repetition of THINK come months apart in reading rather than days, I wouldn’t bother connecting dots between them. Yet, it’s hard not to — it’s hard not to read between the lines when one book follows another that follows another in quick succession — when all elevate the importance of thinking.
I read Diane first.
“Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK. In a notebook she wrote, I’m reading Tom Robbins’s book Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. The passage about marriage ties in with women’s struggle for accomplishment. I’m writing this down for future THINKING…”
The importance of thinking to Keaton’s mother grew with her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. Just as Minot’s character, Ann Lord, magnifies the disjointed THINKing of the dying, while lying bedridden during her last days of cancer.
“The world shifted as if a piece of paper had been flipped and she was now living on its other side. Things turned transparent, the man one married, the house one lived in, the bracelet one wore, they all became equal to each other, equal motes of dust drifting by. Strange things were happening something has already happened. For two days a leaf the size of a ham hung in the air one foot from her face. She grew sensitive to the different shades of white on the ceiling. Her sense was not always right. The position of her arm had something to do with inviting people to dinner. She needed to move the pillow so a boat could dock there. She knew it wasn’t logical and wondered if the drugs were obscuring things then it seemed as if the drugs were making it easier to read the true meaning.” [page 23]
I find Minot’s prose beautiful and the slippery loose thinking of the dying mother believable — that steady stream of consciousness with drip, drip, drips of lucid thoughts — since it reminds of my own weird thinking when lying in bed ill, when one is too sick to do anything but lie and think. But in truth, too sick to think too.
Then there’s that third voice, that of L’Engle {Herself}. In introducing her work of compilations on the writing life, Carole F. Chase tells of L’Engle’s workshop teaching days at Wheaton College in the seventies, and of L’Engle’s favorite first assignment:
“Pick a biblical character and then write a midrash about him or her. These are the rules: You may think as long as you like, but you may write for only half an hour. Tomorrow you will share these stories with each other.”
And this second one, that followed:
“Write about one of the happiest times in your life. Think all you want, but you may only write for half an hour. Bring what your write to class tomorrow.”
No need for Chase to tell the story of L’Engle’s third assignment.
And perhaps, no need for me to pick up a fourth book anytime soon?
I think. Think. THINK.
an everyday life 
A beautiful post linking three seemingly unrelated genres and yet they all have one thing in common: inspiration. It’s poignant that Diane’s Mom had to remind herself to THINK. That would become her struggle against oblivion from Alzheimer’s. Don’t you just love her memoir. Madeleine L’Engle is able to mash intellect and the spiritual. Herself is inspiration. I have not read Minot’s Evening, but is curious to know whether it’s the source material for the movie of the same name, with Vanessa Redgrave. Yes, I’ve just checked it on imdb… it is the novel on which the movie is based. There’s some good performance in there. Have you seen it?
Oh, I loved Diane’s memoir very much. I like how thinking links the pages and the lives of Diane and her mother — how Diane wonders, out loud more than once, whether her mother’s insecurities are the source of her Alzheimer’s. And how, when she poses the question for the final time — at least within the covers of the book — how she prefaces her question with words to the effect of, “I know I’ve asked this before…” Just in case we think, even for a moment, that Diane’s thinking is coming unhinged. But isn’t that just how we often think — over and over, each turn of the thinking coming in closer to an answer?
And then Evening — both the beautiful movie and the book. Yes, I saw it. Those white sheer curtains that billow and whip with the wind in the dying Ann’s room is an image that has lived me since I first viewed the movie, the summer before Mother died. The questions that her daughters ask about their mother’s past, the wise answer given them by Meyrl Steep’s character, Lila — all this Hollywood magic led me to the novel of the same name. And as it so often happens, I find it different, but in a good way. A very good way. So good, it has led me to purchase another novel by Minot, Monkeys. I’ll let you know what I think about this second read, which actually came first.
Not surprised at all that you’ve read {Herself}. It’s been gathering dust on my shelves for months — on maybe its years, I don’t know — but I found it on the cusp of the new year. And when I opened its cover, I found it was exactly what I was looking for in a morning devotional. As you say, a cross between inspiration and intellect on writing.
Thanks always for dropping in. I’m on my way to Sis’s to do a bit of painting. Wood trim rather than art!
Janell
I’ve had to take some time to think about this one. Finally, it came to me – three books that seem so different may unite so nicely because each of them highlights a different kind of thought process.
It used to be that thinking and feeling were set at odds with each other, like mental and physical, or rational and emotional. But we all know, and now academics will acknowledge, that such pairings represent continua, and we slide between the poles.
Beyond that, most people assume that “thinking” means analysis. I thought that for years. But look! I just used the word “thought” as a replacement for “assume”. I could just as easily have said, “I assumed that for years”.
In fact, we use the word “thinking” pretty loosely, and it covers a lot of territory. When we’re “thinking”, we could be: pondering, reflecting, meditating upon, analyzing, remembering, worrying…. You get the point.
As a matter of fact, I do on a regular basis what L’Engle assigned her students to do. I think while I’m working, and then sit down to write. But my thinking isn’t making a mental outline, or structuring a story. It’s more like the free-floating associative thinking of Minot’s character. I suspect our thinking process is far looser than we imagine, and we move from one sort of process to another without even realizing it.
None of this may make sense to you, but your post made sense to me. At the very least – it was thought-provoking!
Your response is more thoughtful than my free-thinking post!
Or was it, perhaps, a free-of-thinking’ post? — since I wrote out of confusion, as a way to keep those connections alive, to ponder what, if anything, I was to make of what then seemed like a strange ‘message in a bottle.’ What is it I’m to think about, I wondered?
One personal message in the bottle that has since come to me is that I need to think more logically, rather than rely so heavily on my ‘gut’ instincts and emotions. I need to think while I still can, to strengthen the synapses of my brain for later in life thinking.
But you’re right in saying that the word ‘think’ covers a lot of ground. That thinking not only allows us to cover ground but to dig in that ground, and to plant seeds of thoughts in that ground — so out of that thinking ground springs creativity, which in turn, brings forth beauty and joy, that in turn inspires others to meditate and to ponder — to think.
And maybe to post a comment that goes deeper than where original seeds were planted?
Janell