Silences Book

"The silences I speak of here are unnatural, the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being … when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestation; the frost comes premature."

Creativity requires time. Time requires money. A significant percentage of potentially creative people are held back because of these facts, which Tillie Olsen explores in this groundbreaking study, first published in 1978.

The necessities of earning a living, and/or of caring for children or family, have prevented working people and women specifically from a creative life. Olsen shares her own story, and then provides a truckload of examples to convince the reader of what we have missed due to this forced silencing of creative people who are too busy to create.

"As for myself, who did not publish a book until I was fifty, who raised children without household help … who worked outside the house on everyday jobs as well … The years when I should have been writing, my hands and being were at other (inescapable) tasks … The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years'response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters'stay with you, mark you, become you."

The writers journals and letters she draws from are fascinating'Virginia Woolf, but also Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Katherine Mansfield, and many more. She also mines the territory for lesser-known writers, and brings back some that should be more widely read. An extensive excerpt from Rebecca Harding Davis is included, and leaves me anxious to read more.

Finally, a quote from Emily Brontё that not surprisingly sums it all up with blistering poetry:
"O! dreadful is the check'intense the agony'
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain."