We Have to Be Time Travelers Now
A mental framework for making it through a difficult time
I like “shopping” for books in my own home by walking over to my bookshelf and pretending I’m in a used bookstore where every book costs zero dollars. It helps that I have terrible book memory, which means that every book feels new to me. (“Which one was Moby Dick again? The whale or the guy?”)
The other night, I went shopping with a purpose: I was looking specifically for books about writing. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the power of “writing through” the time we’re in, and I’ve been writing a lot more. I grabbed Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, On Writing by Stephen King, The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, Poking a Dead Frog by Mike Sacks (a highly entertaining book on comedy writing), and Henry Miller on Writing by Henry Miller — a book I’d forgotten I owned, much less read — and sat down to browse through them all.
The page I happened to open the Miller book to was an odd, rambling letter dated January 16, 1938, to the publisher Michael Fraenkel, but it contains a set of lines that immediately felt profound and urgent:
“Every day, I live in three times — the past, the present, and the future. The past is the springboard, the present the melting pot, and the future the delectation. I participate in all three…
