Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Anthony and Cleopatra at Trinity College Gardens, Oxford

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Anthony and Cleopatra at Trinity College Gardens, Oxford

I enjoy the Oxford Shakespeare Company’s production of “Anthony and Cleopatra” in the gardens of Trinity College. Trinity at dusk looks more like a stately home than a college.
The production of this perennially moving play was professional and gripping–the story of a gifted soldier and politician who finds deeper satisfaction in lust/love than in soldiership, empire, fame and wealth in competition with Octavius Caesar who was cold-bloodedly and whole-heartedly focused on his own success and advancement.  As C.S. Lewis often says, at some level, people do get what they whole-heartedly seek; someone as single-mindedly focused on Empire and power would be far more likely to achieve in that one with Anthony’s divided distracted heart.
Single-mindedness, whole-hearted pursuit of one’s goals sadly achieves more than giftedness. Giftedness  without discipline and focus gets one nowhere, whereas work and focus make up for the lack of giftedness. So therein is hope for everyone, and a cautionary tale for the gifted!
Though Anthony was a nobler, kinder, better human being than Caesar the fact that Caesar would win their power struggle was an inevitable and foregone conclusion. Whereas Anthony, the more interesting person, was swayed by pride, lust, loyalty,emotion, honour, Caesar was cold-blooded and rational, and governed by his head rather than his emotions, and he was indeed the man the Roman Empire needed. 

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Writing Schedules

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Lee Gutkind
My triumph climbing the rope led to my understanding and appreciation of a writer’s real secret of success: discipline–an attempt to be creative and productive on a regular basis.  Virtually every writer I have ever known or read about, regardless of genre, lifestyle, or location, writes or “works out,” on a regular schedule.  From Styron to JC Oates to McPhee, writing regimentation is the key to success.
Writers usually work under regimentation: a disciplined, regular schedule, morning, noon or night, day after day, through most of the year.  This is how writers become writers.  They may write an impeccable essay, seemingly with ease.  But they trained hard with disciplined regularity to produce a memorable literary effort.  We often don’t think of writing as a deliberate act of discipline, but that is exactly how the artful essay begins.

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George Orwell on Writing Clearly. THE BEST ADVICE I KNOW OF.

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 George Orwell on Writing Clearly. THE BEST ADVICE I KNOW OF.
From “Politics and the English Language”

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.  In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them.When you think of  a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit in.  When you think of something abstract, you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.  Probably it is best to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.  Afterwards one can choose–not simply accept–the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch around and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person.  This last effort of the mind cuts all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally,

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The importance of choosing the right subject

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‘Sad things can happen when a writer chooses the wrong subject,’ Wilfrid Sheed once observed. ‘First the writer suffers, then the reader, and finally the publisher, all together in a tiny whirlpool of pain.’ 


Struggling mightily with your work is a possible sign that you have chosen something that you should not have chosen, that what you are writing is not right, should not be there at all, or not at such length

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Laurie Lee in “Cider with Rosie” Master of the Revelatory Detail

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Laurie Lee in “Cider with Rosie” Master of the Revelatory Detail

The kitchen, worn by our boots and lives, was scruffy, warm and low, whose fuss of furniture never seemed the same, but was shuffled around each day.  A black grate crackled with coal and beech twigs; towels toasted on the guard; the mantel was littered with fine old china, horses brasses and freak potatoes. On te floor were strips of muddy matting, the windows were coked with plants, the walls supported stopped clocks and calendars, (wonderful revelatory detail) and smoky fungus ran over the ceilings. (another revelatory detail). There were six tables of different sizes, some armchairs gapingly stuffed, (all revelatory) boxes, stools and unravelling boxes, books and papers on every chair, a sofa for cats, a harmonium for coats, and a piano for dust and photographs. (Note understated humour) These were the shapes of our kitchen landscape, the rocks of our submarine life, each object worn smooth by our constant nuzzling, or encrusted by lively barnacles, relics of birthdays and dead relations, wrecks of furniture long since floundered, all silted deep by Mother’s newspapers which the years piled around on the floor. 

Parenthesis, mine.

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