The self is a personal myth – a story in which we sort the complexities and contradictions of lived experience into coherence. The most cruel price of success – that validation of the self by the world – is the way it can frame a person's story, trapping them in believing their own myth. In this regard, learning to live with your success can be as challenging as learning to live with your failures – both are continuous acts of courage and resistance to the reduction of humanity to a matter of selfishness, refusing to measure your soul by the world's scale.
Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) worked on his paintings and prints alone, in pain, out of sight for decades. When the art scene of New York declared him an overnight success, mainly due to his extraordinary nine-month narrative on a remote Alaskan island, he left the city and moved to a quiet place on a farm in the north, then left the continent, returning to the isolated places of the Arctic to paint, write, and ponder the meaning of it all. In a lovely way from N by E (public library) – his comprehensive 1930 memoir of a year spent in the far north, full of wisdom on how to live better – demonstrates that courage, recounting a jewel store encounter that exemplifies the paranoia of success.
Fifteen years earlier, living in Newfoundland during World War II, Kent had adorned his door with a picture of a young woman he had found “weathered and neglected in a junkyard at a junkyard,” which he had washed, sanded, painted and bejeweled to restore her shocking beauty. When the time came for him to return to New York, he longed to take him home, but he could not afford the expenses:
I gave what I could for him. But I was poor and small. So I left him there.
Ten years passed. The gallery world woke up to the brilliant originality of his paintings and Kent became one of New York's most famous artists. One day, he wandered into a thrift store and there was his girlfriend, “not changed at all” – the ghost of a life that had changed so much, yet at that moment Kent realized how hard he had to fight not to change her, not to turn her into his image. He narrates:
Stepping out from among the rare cupboards and chairs and clocks and pottery, the torn and melted chattels of decayed humanity, he gazed — the sailor's lover — empty, as if the room, the city, and the world were part of the vast ocean and space of which he was born. And when I turned and ran to him, and sweet memories and love were crowded and ringing in my brain and breast, as I tried to touch him as I used to do – suddenly I didn't dare. And I knew what time and wealth had changed. And I insulted myself.
“Where did you find him?” I asked the seller in a whisper.
“Boston,” he whispered back.
So – without even asking what the price of his city would be – I went out.
Couple this modern koan, which releases many nuances of wisdom when you turn it into the language of the mind, with Arundhati Roy in a profound measure of success, and revisit Kent in the desert, solitude, and creativity.
