I’ve been re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The television series I watched on Hulu prompted me to download the original book on my Kindle. I am reveling in the beauty of the author’s work. Her simple, but weighted turn of phrase can evoke dread or irony. Make me ponder the world.
This story is fiction. Made up. Not true.
But it is, imperfectly, truth personified.
This book was published in 1985, when my daughters were only five and seven. I read it so long ago that I had forgotten all but plot summary. It was escapist reading for me then. Its cautions and its hope sailed right over my head. I was a little numb at the time.
But it’s still here, speaking to me now. Look what I missed. The warning that there are risks in complacency. That religious structures may be antithetical to faith and virtue. That human beings treated as possessions, pawns and tools signal encroaching rot in society. That government can be subverted. As it has been countless times in history.
I’m awed by this book. How it makes me think.
Like I have been awed in the past by The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. And by Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. And To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. And Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. And more. And more.
And what struck me next was that these books, and hundreds or thousands of other books, and the effects they have created over these decades or centuries, have this in common: They are each a made thing. A constructed entity, produced by struggling, imperfect human effort and ingenuity, grown out of the writer’s imagination, hard work, and skill.
The author started the same way we all started when we were five or six, with just a pencil and a piece of paper, writing their first name for the first time. The author dreamed it up, each of them. Invented this published allegory standing in for life itself, imparting some personal or universal wisdom about the nature of human experience.
The author built something new that never existed before. Like a child’s father helps him to construct a birdhouse out of plywood, glue and nails. He needs encouragement, and practice, and trial and error. He’s learning to make more complex constructions later on in his life. He has to be willing to try, and to endure mistakes and failures. He has to build on what he learns. He has to develop patience. He’s learning now, so that perhaps one day he will have learned how to construct a skyscraper.
Books are constructed things. That encouraged me, somehow. To think about these books that have inspired me, not as natural formations like a mountain range, pre-existing beyond my understanding or ability. But as human projects undertaken, worked at, sweated and worried over, eventually completed. Books are built of letters, words, paragraphs and patience (punctuated with impatience,) and stubbornness, and conviction, and maybe a little fanaticism and perfectionism. A little obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Human constructions, like an invention patented, a system enacted and affecting outcome, a product developed and marketed, a business built and thriving, a union formed and bringing change. An industry, an economy, a nation. We humans make things, some constructed on a foundation of ideas held sacred. Some for money, or to gain power over others. I might have reverence or ambivalence or revulsion for a book or for a corporation or for an agency or a government. I won’t like all their intentions or their effects. We won’t all agree on the outcomes.
But each of us can build something. A contribution to human endeavor, based on our interest and strength and skill. We can use the failures to recalibrate, adjusting the course toward eventual completion.
I have an interest in building with words and ideas. Not everyone will like what I construct. My writing project, now unfinished, does not function today as I have in my mind that it should. It’s still raw. So I’ll guard what is still in-process from public view until it’s completed. I’ll keep hammering away at what I’m building.
Margaret Atwood, and John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison had this in common: they developed their raw, unformed ideas with stubborn, repetitive hard work. They kept trying. They didn’t give up. And eventually they gifted the world with a whole and complete articulation of ideas that became a part of our cultural canon. An experience we can enter like a house constructed of art. Like the palpable beauty that we step inside when we’re in the presence of the statue of David that Michelangelo “constructed” out of a piece of marble. Or a different kind of beauty in the experience of a Gustave Klimt painting.
There will come a day when I’ll invite the world to step through the portal of my completed structure, into the world of made-up characters who have something real to say. For now, it’s still under construction. Back to work. Donning my hard hat now.
