RACHEL CARSON: EMBRACE THE LONELINESS OF CREATIVE WORK

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness,” Rilke wrote in reflecting on the lonely patience of creative work — patience needed not only in art but in every realm of creativity, including science, and perhaps nowhere more so than at the uncommon intersection of the two.

In her unexampled union of art and science, the marine biologist and poetic nature-writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) neither romanticized nor rued the essential loneliness of creative absorption. Instead, she addressed it with the plain poetics of her lived experience. 

Even after her lyrical writing about the science of the sea won her the nation’s highest honor of literary art and her 1962 book Silent Spring catalyzed the environmental movement, making her the era’s most revered science writer, Carson continued making time to respond to letters from readers. In this superhuman feat — one downright impossible in our age of email, when millions of readers can reach a single writer’s inbox with the unmediated tap of a virtual button — Carson hauled trunkfuls of letters home, prioritizing those from students and young women asking her advice on writing. Responding to one of them, she offered:

Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He* moves into a realm where he has never been before — perhaps where no one has ever been. It is a lonely place, even a little frightening.

In another letter, writing to a young woman in whom Carson saw her younger self, she deepens and broadens the sentiment:

You are wise enough to understand that being “a little lonely” is not a bad thing. A writer’s occupation is one of the loneliest in the world, even if the loneliness is only an inner solitude and isolation, for that he must have at times if he is to be truly creative. And so I believe only the person who knows and is not afraid of loneliness should aspire to be a writer. But there are also rewards that are rich and peculiarly satisfying.

With thanks to Maria Popova (The Marginalian)

https://www.themarginalian.org/?mc_cid=630fec02d1&mc_eid=73733b688f