{"id":120339,"date":"2018-10-22T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=120339"},"modified":"2018-10-14T19:04:16","modified_gmt":"2018-10-14T18:04:16","slug":"borges-on-turning-trauma-misfortune-and-humiliation-into-raw-material-for-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/10\/borges-on-turning-trauma-misfortune-and-humiliation-into-raw-material-for-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Borges on Turning Trauma, Misfortune, and Humiliation into Raw Material for Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAll that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cForget your personal tragedy,\u201d<\/em> Ernest Hemingway exhorted his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald in a tough-love letter of advice<\/a>. \u201cGood writers always come back. Always.\u201d<\/em> It is an insight as true of writers as it is of all artists and of human beings in general, as true of personal tragedy as it is of collective tragedy \u2014 something Toni Morrison articulated in her mobilizing manifesto<\/a> for the writer\u2019s task in troubled times: \u201cThere is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

That is what Jorge Luis Borges<\/strong> (August 24, 1899\u2013June 14, 1986) \u2014 born the same year as Hemingway, writing two decades before Morrison \u2014 conveys with uncommon splendor of sentiment in Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the record of his dialogues with the Argentine journalist and poet Roberto Alifano, conducted in the final years of Borges\u2019s life, by which point he had been blind for almost thirty years.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jorge Luis Borges<\/p><\/div>\n

In a passage Susan Sontag would come to quote in her magnificent letter to Borges<\/a> composed on the tenth anniversary of his death, he reflects:<\/p>\n

A writer \u2014 and, I believe, generally all persons \u2014 must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Complement with Simone Weil on how to make use of our suffering<\/a>, Marina Abramovi\u0107 on turning trauma into fuel for art<\/a>, and May Sarton on the artist\u2019s task to rise above the tumult of the times<\/a>, then revisit Borges on writing<\/a>, the measure of success<\/a>, collective joy and collective tragedy<\/a>, the paradox of time<\/a>, and the illusion of the self<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAll that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":120341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}