Our lives are defined not by what we have but what we give — on what and whom we spend our energy and time, how we share our material possessions and our mental powers, what we do with our gifts. “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in contemplating the nature of creativity. “You open your safe and find ashes.”
Paradoxically, the ability to give hinges on the ability to receive: You must be rested in order to labor, taking the repose it takes to recharge your vital energies; you must be interested in order to be interesting, taking the world in with a greedy curiosity that absorbs its beauty and strangeness in order to metabolize it into meaning.
C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) offers a wonderfully counterintuitive perspective on our notions of generosity and our ideas about what it means to be interesting in his memoir Surprised by Joy (public library).
With an eye to the ideal structure of the creative life, he writes:
It is a life almost entirely selfish. Selfish, not self-centred: for in such a life my mind would be directed towards a thousand things, not one of which is myself. The distinction is not unimportant. One of the happiest men and most pleasing companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindnesses are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude, and admiration.
This is also why, Lewis intimates, the “thrill” of our greatest creative breakthroughs — those revelations that give us back to ourselves, out of which we give our best work to the world — is rooted in “self-forgetfulness”:
Only when your whole attention and desire are fixed on something else — whether a distant mountain, or the past, or the gods of Asgard — does the “thrill” arise.
[…]
Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. Take in what is there.
Couple with John Steinbeck on the art of receiving, then revisit C.S. Lewis on what we long for in our existential longing.
