There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wonder, like enchantment, is not something you can control or plan for or will — it is something that befalls you, overcomes you, pours upon you spontaneous and unbidden. Paradoxically, what makes such spontaneity possible is structure — an organizing principle for the hours of the day that makes room, and reserves it, for these moments of magic.
This is not simple to configure and not easy to enact: How to spend our hours and shape our days may be the supreme problem of human life. There is no permanent, perfect, or universal solution, for the problem is laced with our particularity — but we can learn from each other, borrow bits and pieces from various approaches, constellate a singular organizing principle from different points of light. Among the finest I have encountered, in being both pragmatic and profound, is the one C.S.
Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library). Looking back on a period of especial creative fertility and focus — one in which The Chronicles of Narnia began germinating — he details the deliberate structure of his days: I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better… At one precisely lunch should be on the table; and by two at the latest I would be on the road.
Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Echoing mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd’s insight about what makes an ideal walking companion, he adds: Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world… The only friend to walk with is one… who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared.
Every visionary is equal parts proprietor of a way of seeing unlike any other in the entire history and future of the universe, and product of their time and place. For all his originality and daring, Lewis — born in the final years of the nineteenth century, forged in the crucible of proper Englishness — was still touchingly a product of his culture: The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. Tea should be taken in solitude.
Tea comes with a light meal. Observing that, unlike walking and talking, “eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably,” he recounts always dining with a book — though not all books would do. Read, instead, “a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere.” To us, the whole of the Internet may be one such gossipy, formless scroll.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
