Infinite Loneliness

I got a bad review. Someone hated my new book.

It happens, I know. It's happened in the past, with other books I've written, thankfully not often, but often enough, and with books that have been otherwise well-received, that I can tell myself not to take this too terribly to heart.

Still. There's always a few hours after I've first ingested a bad review when I firmly believe everything it says: at best, that I have delivered something dreadfully unworthy into the world; at worst, that I am a bad person. The most extreme example of the character-indicting sort of review that I ever got was for a non-fiction book in which I confessed that on a few occasions, when my small children were behaving miserably, I fantasized about hitting them. Not that I hit them, mind you - that I allowed myself to entertain the image. For this, the reviewer lambasted my "Medea-like parenting."

Medea, you may remember, is that character from Greek mythology who murders her own small children as an act of revenge on her husband for abandoning her.

The nice thing about this particular bad review was that it was so hyperbolic, it was a little easier to believe it might have fallen short of being a completely measured response to the material. And yet. Even in this case I had a time of feeling wobbly. (Not only was I a terrible writer, but a terrible mother, too!) A friend of mine eventually had a t-shirt made up for me that said MEDEA-LIKE in blue felt letters across the chest, and this cheered me up some, especially when I'd wear it to kindergarten pick-up.

The thing is, any piece of writing is an effort to communicate, to make some truth manifest and then put out a call for witnesses to that truth. It's an effort to draw people together through the medium of words, and the underlying wish is always that the receiver will in some way recognize what she reads, and in so doing join with an invisible community of people who are performing the exquisitely delicate act of saying yes, I see. You're not alone.

This is what we ask our mothers to do for us when we are little. We bring them things, drawings, ideas, dreams, nightmares, questions, songs, bottle caps, inchworms. We display these things for our mothers' gaze. Their willingness to look, and to respond - these are everything to us.

Years ago, my mother introduced me to a Rilke quote:

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.

Works of art are also created out of an infinite loneliness, in recognition of the fundamentally solitary nature of our existence, and as an act of rebellion against accepting this as an intractable condition. They are created from our desire to transcend the loneliness of isolation.

Perhaps this is why no bad review can be very easily dismissed. For a bad review always represents a failure - not necessarily on the part of either the author or the reviewer, but a failure to overcome, at least in that instance, the essential loneliness of alienation, misunderstanding, breach.

For all we try to overcome that loneliness as adults, it may really be as children - when we brought those sparkling bottle caps and the intricate plots of our dreams to our mothers - that we came closest to understanding what John Ashbery says in his poem Some Trees:

...you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

Note: The painting is Medea About to Kill Her Children, by Eugène Delacroix.