Inner resources

 Yesterday’s note on Doris Grumbach’s Fifty Days of Solitude should have included an example of the kinds of items that make up the book. Here’s an excerpt from an entry long enough to be an essay: 

Inner resources: What are they? Are they like mineral resources, so deeply buried they require a mining operation to raise them to the surface. Or are they simply there, so that they can simply be used at will, like the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion, as the young Valéry trained himself to do, or like the rich muck of memory that yields useful parallels and evidence for one’s ideas at the moment they are required, or like the ability to lose oneself in books and be comforted and interested in music and live in paintings, to be able to forget the world and remember only the faint shadow of the inner being one is searching for.

 

I’d have put a couple of question marks in there, but Grumbach did not. I take the sentences as questions. Instead of either-or, I’d say both possibilities are sometimes true. Some resources can be tapped only with discipline, which is why some of us are interested in the routines and disciplines of other writers and artists. Some resources seem to require almost no discipline, although I suspect that’s an illusion — that we are simply missing something.

If you saw a course in a college catalog that promised to cultivate “the ability to follow a line of thought to its conclusion,” wouldn’t you take it?

I would. I would take that course first, before all others.

• Dorus Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, pp. 95-6.