"A Truly Humble Cottage"

I finished the first draft of Pulled Into Nazareth today. Finishing a draft is always a memorable occasion. I will spend the rest of the year editing it, but at least some of the suspense of is over. Five years ago I laid out the over-arching scenario of the series of books I am writing. But the details! I never know how the details are going to go until I write each chapter for the first time.

As I write, I keep in mind my desire to be “truly humble.” Christopher Alexander writes: “I say that even humble buildings cannot be made, because the infection which comes from our mechanistic cosmology is mainly one of arbitrariness – and the arbitrariness breeds pretension. In the presence of pretentiousness, true humility is almost impossible. A truly humble cottage even, seems beyond the reach of most builders today.” [Footnote, p. 24, The Luminous Ground, volume 4 of  The Nature of Order]

This small paragraph, an aspect of Alexander’s research and attempt to get beyond a mechanical world view to one in which value has an objective place, strikes me as getting to the heart of the problem writers have as well. Much of current literature certainly seems arbitrary to me, the corollary being that pretension is required to insist on its importance. But pretension doesn’t get you very far.

Of course striving for humility too can also be a dangerous. I keep in mind Neil Innes’ (of Monty Python fame) “Protest Song,” which he introduces by saying “I’ve suffered for my music. Now it’s your turn.” As Don says, “When you give people something it should be a gift, not an invoice.” I certainly don’t suffer as I write, and I do hope my work is a gift to others, and not a demand for attention.

This month also, through the heroic efforts of my brother and sisters, nieces and nephews, the small beach house my Dad built at the edge of a Minnesota lake was reconstructed. The little one-room beach house was a blessed retreat for many of us, but it had become uninhabitable for the last few years due to rot and foundation problems. It is no longer possible to build so close to a lake in Minnesota, but existing buildings are exempted from the rule.

My sister Naomi wrote of her stay in the beach house in 1981, “Never having had a chance to stay down there by the water before, I was overwhelmed by its magic. A small square room with a bed, a rocking chair and a lamp, it perches above the shore. The only thing you can see out of any of the windows is trees and sky and lake. At the head of the bed there is a low window so you can lie on your stomach and look out at the stars over the lake at night. The effect is rather like living in a treehouse – the breeze blows in and out the windows and sings in the branches. And at night if it’s rough you can hear the sounds of water lapping the shore as you lie in bed – or if its quiet, sometimes there’s the eerie cry of a loon echoing across the still space.”

The beach house is indeed “a truly humble cottage.” It of course plays a part in my fictional writing, as do many other aspects of my extended family.