If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve. The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jen Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”
To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. Servant is another unpopular word, a word we have derided by denigrating servants and service. To serve should be a privilege, and it is to our shame that we tend to think of it as a burden, something to do if you’re not fit for anything better or higher.
I have never served a work as it ought to be served; my trickle adds hardly a drop of water to the lake, and yet it doesn’t matter; there is no trickle too small. Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our greatest privilege to be its servant.
~Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle
Feeding the Lake – Madeleine L’Engle
May 30, 2009 by jasongoode
Have you read, Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story? The protaganist is Lisey, the widow of an author who died in mid-life leaving something of a threatening mystery behind him. Lisey is drawn down various paths, and this ‘lake’ exists along one of them. I recalled L’Engle when I read it in King. I wonder if he referenced it consciously.