Faulkner

We don’t know what we’ve been missing—

until our eyes are opened. 

So I tell this story to my students:

Imagine standing in line at the post office, but there’s no one around. You’re waiting… and waiting, thinking of all the errands you need to run as the line behind you keeps growing. After several minutes, the door to the backroom swings open, and you catch a glimpse of the clerk. He’s been playing cards and drinking on the job but pauses now to scribble out a few lines of poetry on a scrap of paper.   

For William Faulkner, this was just a day in the life.

After dropping out of the University of Mississippi, he’d been hired at the university’s post office. So when Faulkner learned that he was about to be fired, he resigned with a scathing note about not being at “the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.”  

I tell my students this story for a reason: Faulkner didn’t stay that way.

I don’t know every detail that led to Faulkner’s transformation, but in a later interview for the 1956 Paris Review, the famous author of As I Lay Dying said that through his writing,

“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.” (The Paris Review Interviews, vol. II (New York: Picador, 2007), 57.)

This process of learning to embrace one’s place is a choice, maybe even a series of choices. It looks different for each of us, but it means focusing the eyes on God’s timing, location, and even specific individuals within our sphere of influence. 

To unearth the treasures of one’s place, wherever we are—that frees us to create art.

A lot of us feel limited by our surroundings. We think—if only I was somewhere else, somewhere different, warm, or green—then I’d be able to really work, to be more effective, to imagine, to create. But as writer Virginia Woolf once said, what you really need is “a room of one’s own.” It only took about a hundred years, but Annie Dillard argued that—actually—what a writer needed was to avoid an appealing place because of its distractions: “One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in dark.”[i] 

So it’s taken me a while, but God (at work in my life) has been teaching me to embrace what is, right here where I’m at, right now in this place, with this family, in this neighborhood, in this church, in this city, in this school where I teach, in this community, in this country, at this time in history. 

Not one part is a mistake. 

I’m curious by nature; I’ve always been this way.  But there’s enough for me just to learn how to love others and share what I have with those in my sphere of influence—and it might just take the rest of my life. As Natalie Goldberg, author of The True Secret of Writing, writes,

We think in our society we have to do something new and exciting—sky diving, car racing, climb to Mount Everest—in order to feel alive and alert. But we can enliven ourselves doing what we do with a little tweak, a little tug. Sit, walk, write—whole universes of liveliness and attention are available. Take advantage of this one great life, right here and now, even before journeying off to the Bahamas, or Tibet, or Madagascar.[ii]

Sometimes when life feels heavy or my mountains loom ahead and my problems seem insurmountable, shifting perspective helps. I don’t need a plane ticket or an escape hatch when sometimes all I need is just a different set of eyes, a different way to look at my scene. So I’ve always loved Richard Scott’s metaphor: “A pebble held close to the eye appears to be a gigantic obstacle. Cast on the ground, it is seen in perspective.”[iii]

So the question is this: What are the treasures in your life hidden in plain sight?   

Copyright of Danico. 2020. All rights reserved.

[i] Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life, 26.

[ii] Goldberg, Natalie. The True Secret of Writing, 19.

[iii] Scott, Richard G. “Finding Joy in Life.” May 1996.