Readers of The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire don't need to be reminded of Shirley Hazzard's crystalline eloquence and compassion. The narrator of her major works is an observer reluctant to judge but impossible to deceive, intrinsically decent and therefore understanding of indecency, of every human impulse, high or low. She finds words for yearnings, devotions and obsessions that defy our fear of learning too much about ourselves.
I've been treating myself to all the Hazzard artistry I can get my hands on, re-reading the novels and novellas and discovering short stories that offer the same exquisite insight.
But Hazzard's nonfiction is this binge's unexpected delight and challenge. I'm writing to recommend We Need Silence To Find Out What We Think, a collection of essays edited by Briggita Olubas.
Published in 2016 -- the year Hazzard passed away, at age 85 -- the book comprises essays representing her experience, obsessions and aesthetic. There are book reviews: Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Matilde Serao, Barbara Pym, Patrick White, William Maxwell and more. Essays on international relations and the United Nations, where Hazzard worked in the 1950s, offer fascinating background to her novel's settings. Travel essays testify to her love and understanding of Naples and Tuscany.
But the title essay begins the book, and the reader will understand that the entire collection is a meditation on the power and purpose of the written word.
The New York Times, which published the essay in 1982, treated the essay title as a subtitle and headlined it, "The Making of a Writer." And though "We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think" can certainly be read as a discussion of "the necessary margin of tranquility for creative work," I recommend it—and I'll be so bold as to suggest Hazzard intended it—as a protest against an onslaught affecting everyone. She calls it "the deafening clamour of 'communications,' with all its disturbing and superfluous information."
We need—I need—to be reminded that the current, dominant technology and culture of distraction is just an overwhelming elaboration of a problem that was bad enough back in the 20th century. Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter (Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me) tried to warn us, just as Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention) tries today.
Back in 1982, Hazzard decried the cult of "novelty and the merely up-to-date [...] urged [on us] not only in the name of innovation but as some new form of social obligation." Her argument for attention, for the focus required to find the one, right word is an artful exhortation to "preserve some inwardness amid the din.” Follow that link to the Times archive and let her encourage you to "find out what [you] truly think."
William Craig teaches writing at Dartmouth and founded the Meetinghouse Readings in Canaan. The author of Yankee Come Home: On The Road from Guantanamo to San Juan Hill*, he was a longtime writer and editor for the* Valley News and the creator of Upper Valley Image*. His fiction, criticism, and journalism have appeared most recently in* Gulf Coast and The Boston Globe*.*