“The writer’s job is to tell the truth … I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”
Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast
I have not always written before, but have always been able to write for reward — for a grade, to win a contest, to meet a financial commitment. My longest sustained stretch was during my first year or two of Recovery, when I journaled at least five mornings every week, during the 7am AA meeting that I attended religiously. I hurt more then, and I was desperate to ease the pain of feeling that “my life” was slipping away. More truthfully, the pain of fearing that I had given away “my life” through poor judgement, amorality, and drunkenness. I can always find the right words for a journal entry, because I don’t expect anyone to see it, or not to see it until I’m gone, and so its easy to fill a page with the true sentences of one morning, the aftermath of one event, the disappointments of one process or another. I never reread those old entries, but I don’t remember ever writing about something I loved, or laughed about, or enjoyed, unless it was the rote, AA exercise of listing my gratefulness: wife, family, security, resources, etc. Mostly I dwell on the shortcomings, because I mostly spend my thought on where and how “my life” doesn’t match the detailed picture that I keep in my head, developed over many, many years of listening, reading, and judging.
I have a long, old, and growing list of ideas — essays, reviews, poems, stories, books — and feel that I am thinking my days away. I worry too much about how I will earn money, or what will happen if I don’t earn enough, and what my friends and neighbors will say if I fall behind in the race. Will I ever lose this fear of rejection, of being separate and undesirable? If I can’t lose it, will I ever rise above it?
Hemingway’s “One True Sentence” becomes my “One True Thing.” We either develop a sense of purpose, and meaning, or we develop reactions to absence, coping mechanisms to pass time, to look busy and productive. We “fill the hole,” as my Friends in Recovery say. What is my One True Thing, the action that erases every distinction between WORK and LEISURE, JOB and HOBBY, VOCATION and AVOCATION? What is my ART?
Discipline, the Higher Power. Process, the Higher Power. I believe that God will help me, will guide my hands when my motives are right. God always gives me words on deadline, when I’ve needed to move “my life” forward on the chosen path. I’ve always received the One True Sentence that unlocks the gate, but only in bursts, only in emergencies, or only if no one is looking, or will look. But isn’t someone always looking?
