Unless It Moves the Human Heart Read online

  You must write as if your reader needed you desperately, because he does. If, as Kafka said, a book is an ax for the frozen sea within us, then write with that frozen sea in mind and in view. See your reader, who has fallen through the ice of his own manufacture. You can just make him out, as he flails in slow motion, palms pressed upward under the ice. Here’s your ax. Now, chop away and lift him up by the shoulders. And what do you get out of this act of rescue? You save two people: your reader and yourself. Every life is exposed to things that will ruin it, and often do, for a time. But there is another life inside us that remains invulnerable and glimpses immortality. For the writer that life exists on the page, where it attaches itself to every other life, to all the lives that have been and will be.

  From time to time, during the months we have been together, it may have seemed that I expected too much of you. In fact, I have expected too little. To be the writers you hope to be, you must surrender yourselves to a kind of absurdity. You must function as a displaced person in an age that contradicts all that is brave, gentle, and worthwhile in you. Every great writer has done this, in every age. You must be of every age. You must believe in heroism and nobility, just as strongly as you believe in pettiness and cowardice. You must learn to praise. Of course, you need to touch the sources of your viciousness and treachery before you rise above them. But rise you must. For all its frailty and bitterness, the human heart is worthy of your love. Love it. Have faith in it. Both you and the human heart are full of sorrow. But only one of you can speak for that sorrow and ease its burdens and make it sing—word after word after word.

  Acknowledgments

  Rachel Bressler, Carla Caglioti, Libby Edelson, Rachel Elinsky, Jane Freeman, Dan Halpern, Shirley Kenny, Gloria Loomis, Peter Manning, Robert Pattison, Robert Reeves, Ginny Rosenblatt, Julie Sheehan, Ginny Smith, Martha Smith, Stephen Spector, Adrienne Unger, Lou Ann Walker, Lydia Weaver.

  Also by Roger Rosenblatt

  Making Toast

  Beet

  Lapham Rising

  Children of War

  Rules for Aging

  Witness

  Anything Can Happen

  Black Fiction

  Coming Apart

  The Man in the Water

  Consuming Desires

  Life Itself

  Where We Stand

  Copyright

  UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART. Copyright © 2011 by Roger Rosenblatt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-196561-6

  EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780062037251

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