Later, in graduate school, there was a certain real thicket where two of my important life stories collided. Here I’ll give in to that temptation, and call this time of remitting pursuit of the tangle: “my twenties.” Getting older, one is tempted to refer to whole swatches of the complicated past by a single name. Many were not even true but, believe me, the tangle was thick with them.
Some I clung to, and some I fought fiercely. Some of those stories protected me, and some surprised me. A career path it wasn’t.įor many years, if I wasn’t actually finding a story, stories were finding me.
Since I wanted to be a writer, I took this mystery as my charge, and knowing nothing of persistence, or clarity, or anything beyond an overwhelming desire to go deep, I threw myself into the tangle with all my heart and soul. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is lost.” The whole quotation is this: “Writing fiction,” Welty says, “has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. “To find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” In her book One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty says that the job of the writer is “to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” Maybe it was the rhythm, the way the words swerved and swayed innocently into a dark place – and then stood still.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I came across a phrase that I had no art to decipher, but that nonetheless made a little knot in my memory. (As in: If I want to accomplish “X” by 2010, what do I need to do be working on right now?) But tonight I want to talk about what might happen if one loses confidence in the accounting and the balance sheets loses a sense of the bottom line: loses, perhaps, the very story of one’s life. Even if my “five-year plan” changes, there’s a part of my mind that’s always set in the future, and operating backwards. It’s not that I don’t live by lists and charts and calendars, because I do.
So tonight, I am going to take a bit of a risk in turning back to the figurative. To chart our paths, we get good at making charts, and learning how to follow them. We are rightly skeptical about cultural messages that come wrapped in the words of “value,” “worth,” and the final “measure” of a life, and turn instead to a different model of “accounting” for ourselves: costs and benefits, sacrifices and investments, opting-in or opting-out, and always, always management. When women talk about a career/life balance, we often step away from figurative language and toward a language of figuring.
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