Daily Nourishment for March 26, 2024: Read the Best Writers from All Different Periods because You Already Belong to Your Time
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 40 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
“How should you read? What should the diet of your reading be? Read the best writers from all different periods; keep your reading of contemporaries in proportion—you do not want a steady diet of contemporary literature. You already belong to your time.” - Lydia Davis, “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” from Essays One
Pause.
Take six deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale. Then read or listen to “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” by Wallace Stevens.
Prompt.
Here’s more from Lydia Davis: “You should be reading a lot—reading different kinds of books but also reading in different ways: sometimes fast, and sometimes slowly. Sometimes just absorbing what you are reading, losing yourself; at other times analyzing as you read, developing your awareness of how a writer achieves an effect; sometimes stopping to analyze closely just one sentence or one paragraph.”
Practice.
Set an eight-minute timer and read one paragraph from a favorite book. Stay with that same paragraph for the entire eight minutes and take notes on how the writer “achieved an effect.” Then take notes for a few more minutes on how you experienced the eight-minute exercise.
Want More?
Richard Rodriguez on writers who influenced his writing:
“As a reader, I knew Auden the poet many years before I knew Auden the essayist. I don’t know quite how to say this, but I find him gloriously un-modern because of his religious faith. There is a strength in his essays, some bedrock, that makes him seem, in the best sense, Victorian. He doesn’t go all wobbly as a modern might.
My earliest influences in the art of the personal essay were more local. There was Joan Didion—the Didion of those glorious California essays of the sixties. Because she was from Sacramento and writing about the Central Valley when I first read her, it was she who taught me to imagine my own Sacramento as a literary landscape. About that same time, there was William Saroyan. There were voices in Saroyan, particularly the wondering boy in Fresno and the hungry writer’s voice in San Francisco, I have never forgotten. For all of the passion and energy in Saroyan, however, there was something sexless about him—the son of a Presbyterian minister. Maybe that sexual diffidence deepened my sense of companionship with him. For reasons of my own, I did not, for many years, imagine sex in my writing.
I should mention two other influences crucial for my appreciation of the personal essay. First, James Baldwin, the great Jimmy Baldwin. I began with Nobody Knows My Name and I never let go of him—through the years of the Negro Civil Rights movement on our small black-and-white TV, then the many decades after. What impressed me about Baldwin was his literary elegance, despite all. He was never more resolutely in control than when he was describing Jim Crow America. The hideousness of anti-black racism could not undermine the clean line of his prose. And Orwell! I learned from George Orwell that narrative was compatible with the essay, that it was possible to write what I call the “biography of an idea”—and trace the way an idea makes its way through a life. Beginning with my first book and in all the books after, I employed the fictional devices of the short-story writer in writing my essays. My best essays, I think, are unafraid to be stories. That’s Orwell’s influence.”
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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