Stuffing Our Eyeballs

In the world of writing, "hunkering down" is a term taken from a section of essays in The Writing Life published by The Washington Post about "writers on how they think and work." "Hunkering down," can mean getting serious about your craft, but it can turn writers into becoming isolationists, solo adventurers,lonely wanderers in the phantasmagorical world of language. A Scrooge-like, Grinch-y recluse then emerges from an hazy veil of flickering images that casts shadows on a cave wall created by some magic lantern.  "Hunkering down" tends to beget some idea that the dedicated writer's only world consists of "spiritual and artistically inspirational" landscapes shaped by a profundity of words, sentences, and paragraphs.

However, the craft of writing is initiated by the opposite experience. It comes from watchful observations of the outside world, interactions with and between people, the exploration of places and times that fall outside the boundaries of the familiar, and attentive awareness to surrounding conversations. Wendy Wasserstein, acclaimed playwright and author writes, "the joy of being on the road is having dinner alone" (The Writing Life, "Holiday at The Keyboard Inn"). Dinner is a time to become a student of other people's lives rather than live in the solitary world of the mind. It is a time to immerse oneself and to "listen carefully . . . to judge harshly the surrounding couples," and to speculate about their private lives.

There tends to be a notion that the "serious" writer is some irascible loner, such as William Faulkner or, more recently, Cormac McCarthy, although the latter is known more for his hermit-like persona rather than his Faulkneresque irascibility. "Hunkering down" conjures an image of the lonely writer hunched over a slaving hot keyboard. However, to be an authentic writer, one must engage in the outside world, and make time to put aside the remote, virtual world that exists only on the printed page. Otherwise, as Patricia Cornell writes in her essay, which is also included in The Writing Life, "If I stop seeing, hearing, touching,

there will be no story. I will be a writer with nothing to say—a violin with no music to play," which inadvertently rhymes and might be used as a kind of mantra to accompany a writer on the journey to a final destination. Or, as David McCullough, author of the critically acclaimed book-turned-mini-series John Adams, quotes, "What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything."

"Hunkering down" means, then, not only getting serious about the so-called writing life, but also never forgetting that real life is rich with meanings to write about. We must “stuff our eyeballs,” as Ray Bradbury says, with metaphors and symbols of the actualities of the surrounding landscape—living metaphors that only then “bid [writers] jump to run and trap them” with words that subsequently “stuff” the page with “compacted truths of a life” that echoes with the refrain, “Live forever!”

All quotes are taken from The Writing Life, edited by Marie Arana, 2003)