A word is like an action; once something is spoken it carries consequences. We should try to be as precise as possible about ideas that matter most. When we are precise about ideas, we are giving them a place in the world.
When people have been dispossessed – of home, landscape, even of their calendar, their relationship to time, as the Nubians are in The Winter Vault , of love – what is left? Language, memory, one's own body. In this book words are a moral question. A way of grasping at a truth, a way of holding and carrying. They are an argument against loss. The whole tenor and tone of The Winter Vault wishes to make this assertion.
I have immense respect for language; it is a respect that has been forged out of the deepest despair of language, out of urgency and impotence – the failure of words to effect change. A writer always faces the question of what words are worth. Most of us have experienced the utter hopelessness, the helplessness of being misunderstood by another human being; and more, of not being known by another, no matter how deeply one tries to speak one's heart, to express a belief, or to keep alive through language the memory of one who has died.
Ten years is along time to live with the writing of a book. During this time, my own children have been born, and friends' children: Rebecca, Naomi Rose, Gemma, Jaymz, Viva, Mary. Recently I was in Germany to give a reading from The Winter Vault . The event had been sold out two months before my arrival and I read and spoke to an audience of over 650 people. Elke Heidenreich conducted an on-stage interview. The event lasted two and a half hours, without a break, and the room was galvanized, myself included, with the most intense listening: thinking, feeling. The book had been translated with the care with which it was written.
Afterwards one of the newspaper journalists who interviewed me told me that the first real conversation that he had with the woman who was to become his wife was about the novel Fugitive Pieces . If it were not for the depth of that conversation about your book, our feeling for it, he said, we both believe that we would not have come together as we have. And now, he said, we have a two-month-old child! Both me and my wife think of it this way: Your book has given birth to a child! The journalist and I looked at each other. The moment was a gift, and emotional – he was a new father – and we stood grinning at each other, and began to laugh, we could not stop laughing: pure joy.
A woman takes a book of poetry, Miner's Pond , to read in the hospital when she goes each night for dialysis, for a year before she dies. She reads by the light of the dialysis machine. A woman reads the novel Fugitive Pieces in the months of illness before her death, she reads aloud to her husband, together they choose a line from the book for her gravestone. Strangers have written to me with such generosity, such open human courage and inner resolve, letters so precious to me, stories so valuable, my life would most certainly be less without them. Recently I have been given reason to understand that it is better to share such stories, of such real courage and belief, than not, for fear of being thought to be “putting oneself forward.” People believe in books, they believe in language – not idly, but with conviction. Books are read with the same degree of conviction that books are written. This is not speculation or naiveté.
I believe a writer must make a serious pledge to the reader; to write from the bottom of one's heart, with the furthest extent of one's knowledge, with conscience; and with consideration for every word.
What am I trying to say in The Winter Vault ? Among other things, that it is not enough not to do harm; one must also do good. That regret and shame are not the end of the story; they are the middle of the story. That sometimes language – not metaphorically, but in a real way – is all that's left.
Readers have shown me what every writer ironically finds most difficult to believe: Language matters. How the story is told. We don't always speak precisely or thoughtfully – of course not – but sometimes we do. And that is exactly the point. Just as it is important to be precise about what love makes us capable of, and incapable of. There are circumstances in which it matters almost more than anything.
When language fails it can fail out of thoughtlessness, irresponsibility, poor judgment, lack of conception. But language also fails for the best of reasons and in the best of ways: by bringing us to moments when only silence and touch will serve. The place that language can take us is precisely to that place beyond language. To raise one's head from the book and to look into the face of one we love.
Anne Michaels's new novel, The Winter Vault, is in stores now.
