'Responsibility to the Accurate Word'

Working in newsrooms for twenty-five years taught me to buffer against distractions. Newsrooms are noisy places – police scanners, televisions and radios, often acrimonious arguments between editors and reporters. You have interviews to conduct and deadlines to meet. To demand silence would probably get you canned so you learn a little discipline, seldom a bad thing. Shifting to universities, where I worked as a science writer for almost twenty years, felt like retiring to a monastery. I always had an office of my own – a monastic cell with a door I could close when not wishing to be bothered. Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) writes in a 1982 essay: “We all need silence -- both external and interior -- in order to find out what we truly think.” 

Hazzard isn’t peddling New Age bromides. My experience suggests interior silence is even more important than the external sort, and harder to come by. Some minds are like Act II, Scene 2 of King Lear – much commotion, little repose. That was me when young. No wonder I got little work done. Writers are unlikely hybrids of selflessness and selfishness, and tend to learn things slowly, if at all. One year earlier, Hazzard had published her masterpiece, Transit of Venus (1980), a rare twentieth-century novel written by, for and about adults. She continues:

 

“The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. . . . I have come more and more to value the view of Ortega y Gasset that ‘without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.’ However passionate the writer's material, some distance and detachment are needed before the concept can be realized. In our time, the writer can expect little or nothing in the way of silence, privacy or removal from the deafening clamor of ‘communications,’ with all its disturbing and superfluous information.”

 

Even truer than it was forty-four years ago. Hazzard quotes from Ortega’s The Dehumanization of Art (1925): “In the world today, gentlemen, a great thing is dying—it is truth. Without a certain margin of tranquility, truth succumbs.”

 

One would take Hazzard less seriously if she weren’t so accomplished a writer. She probably sounds old-fashioned to some readers. She concludes:

 

“There is at least one immense truth which we can still adhere to and make central to our lives -- responsibility to the accurate word. It is through literature that the word has been preserved and nourished, and it is in literature that we find the candor and refreshment of truth. In the words of Jean Cocteau, the good and rightful tears of the reader are drawn simultaneously by an emotion evoked through literature, and by the experience of seeing a word in place.”

 

[Hazzard’s essay is collected in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, 2016.]