Art & Creativity Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Writing brings one low. It strips the vanity from the hand that holds the pen and exposes every insufficiency: the poverty of one’s words, the gaps in one’s knowledge, the pettiness of one’s motives. Edward Dahlberg, who spent his life quarreling with literary pretension and American boosterism, understood authorship as a descent rather than an ascent. A child of orphanages and itinerant labor, later a severe moralist with a prophet’s register, he saw that to set down sentences is to confess dependence on a language made by others and to beg at the table of the dead who used it better. The page is a tribunal where the living are judged against the ancients, and the verdict rarely flatters.

Humiliation here is not mere embarrassment; it is etymological. To be humbled is to be returned to the humus, the soil. Dahlberg’s prose, steeped in Scripture and the classics, aims for that ground where speech is chastened and therefore fertile. One writes under the weight of history, against the resounding authority of books already written, while facing the shabby commerce of the present. The writer is exposed twice over: first to the exposure of self that memoir or imaginative confession requires, as in Because I Was Flesh, and again to the exposure of failure, since language never quite reaches what it seeks. Each sentence is a record of what could not be said.

There is a moral edge to this abasement. To accept humiliation is to forswear the swagger of originality and the consolation of applause. Drafts are repudiations of earlier selves; revisions are acts of penance; publication hands one’s inner life to indifference or scorn. Yet the lowering is the condition for any truth that is not merely ornamental. When pride is pared away, a voice closer to necessity can be heard. Writing, then, is a humiliation not because it defeats the writer, but because it requires the writer to be worthy of defeat. Only from that ground can anything enduring grow.