Shack as Metaphor
categories: Cocktail Hour
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For a pretty humble building, the shack has done a lot of metaphoric lifting for me over the last few years. Tonight, as the storm approaches, I am thinking about it as a stand-in for all the writing the world doesn’t see. “Four fifths of his productive iceberg was under water,” Wallace Stegner wrote in The Uneasy Chair, his biography of Bernard DeVoto. With Thoreau that might have been closer to nine tenths, maybe more. If we define “under water” as writing unseen by the public and we reason, not unreasonably, that had Thoreau’s reputation not been revived, somewhat miraculously, the journal would have been left unread, maybe we are talking closer to 99/100ths. This is something non-writers don’t understand. The real work is not always the work the public sees. The real work goes on daily, unseen, unappreciated. Which doesn’t make writers special. It makes their profession similar, in this way at least, to every other.
So back to the shack. I’ve spent the last 8 months re-building it, shingling it, fixing it up, making it so that it looks completely unlike its truly shack-like predecessor. “A fancy little house,” Nina calls it. But this fancy house is still at sea level and basically in the marsh. And now another storm has taken aim at us. Hence the shack as writing metaphor. All that work. For what?
Not for naught, I would say. I’ve poured time into it and not a little money (cedar shingles are expensive), but I’ve also gotten a lot out of it. Absorbed hours of work and problem-solving. Good chunks of time when I was worried, not about my own troubles, and not focused inward on my own neuroses, but outward into a project that fills up my hard-to-fill mind. I don’t need to say “Just like writing,” do I? You get it. Well more than half the pleasure of it, whatever the worldly results, is in the doing of the thing. The fact that wind may now come and blow my little house down is incidental. In fact, in the long run, it may be advantageous. That way I can build the shack again. How could I get so lucky?
