When the Pen Speaks: The Buried Life

Some years ago, I was a National Humanities Seminar student at Claremont Graduate University in southern California.

It was an eight week seminar devoted to myth study, meeting several times weekly. On a given day, one of us would be responsible for introducing a thematic topic, followed by extended discussion, monitored by a chair nationally recognized for excellence in the subject.

My presentations differed from that of my cohorts, who confidently offered their insights orally, a few notes at the most. For some reason, I’ve always preferred a text, perhaps from being a very deliberative person, mindful of nuance and wanting to find a way of simplifying complexity. I like sorting out enigmas, something requiring reflection and precise articulation, all the bits and pieces I fear I’m likely to omit without a text.

I’ve often felt remorse for this, envying those who verbalize freely. It’s a gift I lack. Were I a more relaxed person, more confident in myself, maybe I could pull it off.

But then I remember that some of the greatest presentations, motivating a nation, inspiring action, were delivered from chiseled texts. We dub their articulators “orators,” but they spoke from manuscripts. Abraham Lincoln, Frederic Douglas, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama; perhaps the most eloquent of them all, Martin Luther King.

One day, a seminar member told me I became another person when I spoke from a text. I wasn’t offended. I knew its truth.

Franz Kafka comes to mind: “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”

And that’s perhaps the best excuse I can offer for my addiction to a text. When I take a pen in hand, I become a stranger to myself. Myriad voices tumble forth, competing to be heard. Writing taps an oceanic source, deep, fathomless, a wellspring the ancient Greeks called daimon, not evil, but spirit entities acting as intermediaries between man and the gods, or what Matthew Arnold termed “the buried stream” :

The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
…
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes (“The Buried Life”).

Older now, I no longer view my reliance on text as a shortcoming but as a conduit that allows me to distill complexity and find precision in the tumult of thought. Perhaps I do become another person when I read from a text, but maybe that person is closer to the truest version of myself.

Writing is not a retreat from spontaneity, but an invitation to clarity; not a crutch but a way of channeling what might otherwise remain unspoken. If history remembers its greatest orators as voices of change, it also remembers the words that gave them their power—carefully chosen, painstakingly shaped, delivered not despite their deliberation, but because of it.

–rj