How Great Writing Nourishes Life

It’s 4.54 am. I awake with a racing heart. I sit up, recalling the dream that woke me. I’m in a dimly lit library, facing faceless people. I’m sitting on an empty desk.  The area I’m in has shelves stacked with books that are higher than my eyes can see.

The faceless people together ask me a question. I must respond, but I’m too nervous to talk. I look at them. They look at me. But abruptly, they shift their focus away from me, leaving me alone. And then awake.

I try deciphering the dream for a few moments, but like so many times before, I come out with nothing. I leave my bedroom quietly, not to wake my wife, and enter my home office. This is my sacred space, my own (Montaigne)Tower, where I spend the first hours of my waking day. There’s a desk with many journals and three shelves of books surrounding me.

As I walk towards the coffee machine to make myself an Espresso Lungo, I’m greeted by Sassy, our Scottish Fold. Always the first one to say Good Morning. I grab my coffee and current book, settling into a lounge chair, where Sassy finds a way to squeeze next to me.

Over the years, I’ve found nothing better to start my day than reading a good book. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, as there are more bad books than good ones.

I often plod on far too long with a book that doesn’t interest me. It’s like I’ve got to get to the end, and it’s been like this for the past few months with the books I’ve chosen.

I’m not sure if my reading has become more sophisticated or if I’ve become infected by the ‘distraction syndrome’ that is prevalent today. I can’t seem to stay with anything for too long before I lose interest.

But today, I’ve abandoned the mediocre book I’m reading and picked up Rachel Cusk’s final book from the Outline trilogy, Kudos. Like the other two (Outline and Transit), it is spellbinding. Within fifteen minutes, I’m already on page 24. There is no labouring but pure ecstasy at the way she puts words together and how she always leaves me thinking.

This trilogy has no plot. She narrates her day with strangers, sharing basic life details, exciting anecdotes, and profound insights, sometimes all within the same paragraph. Surely, this is what writing is all about.

At first, I felt like I was experiencing imposter syndrome. Perhaps I should stop writing since someone else can do it so well.

Then I stopped my chattering mind and reminded myself that it was not about me; instead, I should enjoy her genius.

Reading good writing makes us think more critically. Our best ideas and reflections are rarely borne out of nothing. They manifest from someone else’s.

Through association and drawing connections, we allow our minds to take an idea and refine it to our perspective. Immersing ourselves in the writer’s words and insights makes us think deeply about a topic.

Just look at how Cusk narrates a conversation with an ex-boyfriend that she met by mistake on the high street.

"I had chosen a propitious time for my visit, he said, since it happened to be the brief season when the city’s jacaranda trees were in bloom. They were a feature of the landscape there, running in great tall columns along the boulevards and avenues and decorating the many famous squares. Yet it was only for the merest couple of weeks that they burst into flower, producing great ethereal clouds of luminous violet clusters, which moved in the breezes almost in the manner of water or indeed of music, as though the pretty purple flowers were the individual notes that in chorus formed a rippling body of sound.”

Though I’d never heard of Jacaranda trees, she describes them in such a beautiful way that I feel I’ve seen them in my garden all my life. She then moves from how the trees look to the profound idea that she wants us to reflect on: growth needs time. Any real-life goal we want to pursue needs long-term thinking. There are no quick fixes in life.

“These trees took an extraordinarily long time to grow, he said, and the towering specimens in the city were decades – indeed centuries – old. People sometimes tried to grow them in their own gardens, but unless you were fortunate enough to have inherited one, it was almost impossible to reproduce this spectacle on your own private property. He had many friends – smart, aspirational people of good taste – who had planted a jacaranda tree in their new garden as though this law of nature somehow didn’t apply to them and they could make it grow by the force of their will. After a year or two they would become frustrated and complain that it had barely increased even an inch.”

She then ends the anecdote with something incredible—something I hadn’t thought of before.

“But it would take twenty, thirty, forty years for one of these trees to grow and yield its beautiful display, he said smiling: when you tell them this fact they are horrified, perhaps because they can’t imagine remaining in the same house or indeed the same marriage for so long, and they almost come to hate their jacaranda tree, he said, sometimes even digging it up and replacing it with something else, because it reminds them of the possibility that it is patience and endurance and loyalty – rather than ambition and desire – that bring the ultimate rewards. It is almost a tragedy, he said, that the same people who are capable of wanting the jacaranda tree and understanding its beauty are incapable of nurturing one themselves."

She’s saying that we often hate successful people or ideas because they’ve been the result of endurance, grit, and a consistent, honest, putting-in-the-time approach. No magic potion helped them.

Though we understand that things need time to flourish, we keep chasing rainbows. The haters want to downplay the long time it takes the Jacaranda tree to grow because it reminds them of their own predicament—their failures that they don’t want to reflect on.

Like those who stay in marriages, homes, or bad jobs for far too long because they reason to themselves that they’re not staying long and it’s all temporary.

Where is the ambition and desire they tell themselves as they rip out the Jacaranda to plant more exciting and faster-growing ones?

Can you see how great writers can pull us into their world and thinking, then leave us to think about the deeper questions of our lives?

Where is your Jacaranda Tree story?