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We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays
Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work.
Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite--or maybe because of--the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.
Hazzard writes about her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite--or maybe because of--the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2016
23 people are currently reading
301 people want to read
About the author
Shirley Hazzard
25 books311 followersShirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and as a child travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings. At age 16, she began working for British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After her family moved to New York City, she worked for several years as a typist at the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
After leaving this post, she became a full-time writer and a passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of several of her nonfiction books.
Known for elegant and controlled writing, Hazzard’s works of fiction include five novels. Her last novel, The Great Fire, was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 30, 2019
Shirley Hazzard has been one of my literary heroes since I started writing. I especially love Transit of Venus. Her nonfiction rocks too! If you’re a fan, give Hazzard a 👏.
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December 9, 2021Oh dear she's not only a great fiction writer but also a literary critic and historian. Sometimes I don't even understand her sentences, even though I know all the words. Humbling. Just letting it wash over me, hoping I can integrate some of what she says while I'm sleeping.
July 8, 2021
I have read most of Hazzard's fiction and really loved one of the novels (The Transit of Venus) and enjoyed most of the others, so I was curious to read this collection of her essays. I found them interesting, if not entirely satisfying; she definitely has a set of assumptions that I feel like were fairly common in mid-century -- that the extant Western literary tradition is truly an objective set of standards for Good Literature, that given works of art are true in some permanent, timeless way, and that the 20th century is terrible because it is teaching people to care about groups over individuals. True art, Hazzard seems to think, reflects Human Truth, rather than personal truth, and good readers understand this rather than caring about their own personal situations -- which, indeed, is an idea that some of us in the 21st century are working hard to dismantle!
That being said, I did take some pleasure in her writing, and I very much enjoyed her personal writing about living in Hong Kong as a teenager and the various people she encountered and 'work' she did, or didn't do. I still plan to reread her fiction, and to read the one novel I've been saving; nothing in here put me off of her work, I was just hoping for something that was newer to me than Objective Artistic Truth and Woe The Current Day.
That being said, I did take some pleasure in her writing, and I very much enjoyed her personal writing about living in Hong Kong as a teenager and the various people she encountered and 'work' she did, or didn't do. I still plan to reread her fiction, and to read the one novel I've been saving; nothing in here put me off of her work, I was just hoping for something that was newer to me than Objective Artistic Truth and Woe The Current Day.
December 16, 2024
Ugh, when Hazzard is good, she is so good. And after reading her meditations on the virtue of verbal precision, it's little wonder.
Some quotes:
-"Everyone who writes is asked at some stage, Why? Some writers give answers to that question, but I wonder if it is truly answerable. If ther eis a worthy response, it would to my mind have to do with a wish to close the discrepancy between human experience, with all its strangeness of the mind, as it is known to each of us, and as it is generally expressed. We live in a time when past concepts of an order larger than the self are dwindling away or have disappeared--the deference of the human species and of societies to nationhood, to social systems. The testimony of the accurate word is perhaps the last great mystery to which we can make ourselves accessible, to which we can still subscribe." (3)
-"Articulation is central to human survival and self-determination, not only in its commemorative and descriptive functions but in relieving the soul of incoherence." <--What an argument to continue battling with words to meet our need for expression...! To outsource that process is to surrender to our own incoherence, or accept an arbitrary external authority's promise of relief
-"In its preoccupation with the root of life, language has special responsibilities. Its manipulation, and deviation from true meaning, can be more meaningful than in the case of other arts." (4)
-"Without diminishing the merits and advantages of brevity... literature cannot be looked on as a competition to employ as few words as possible. Rather it is a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a human condition... that is the proper and agonizing business of literature, in which much of the writer's suffering originates: 'the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,' as T.T. Eliot called it." (5)
-"I have said that language bears special responsibilities: the writer's vigilance over language and attention to language are themselves an assumption of responsibility... Our words, whether in literature or in life, are accepted as a revelation of our private nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility we are prepared to assume for it." (6)
-"Along with the transforming power of technology and mass society, there developed in the nineteenth centruy a sort of Industrial Revolution in human expression- an increasing tendency to renounce personal opinion in favor of generalized or official opinion, and to evade self-knowledge and self-commitment through use of abstractions: a wish, in fact, to believe in some process of feeling more efficient than the human soul. There was also an associated new phenomenon of mass communications and mass advertising- that, of new words and usages not spontaneously but speciously brought into wide circulation as a means of profitably directing the human impulse. (The word "jargon," incidentally, anciently derives from the twittering of geese.") (7)
-"Art is not technology and cannot be "mastered." It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of the living experience and a way of communicating with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone." (8)
-"the power of a work of art ultimately derives not form classifiable components but from an enigmatic quality of synthesis, which does not lend itself to analysis." (9)
-"The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. We all need silence-both external and interior-in order to find out what we truly think." (10)
-"It is not, of course, the business of an artist to give satisfaction as if he were some sort of home appliance, but to enlarge our sensation and perception of life." (14)
-"Much of this encroachment of abstract language derives from a modern inability for wholeness; a modern incapacity for synthesis. While it poses as a higher seriousness, abstraction is perhaps another stage in the long attempt to neutralize the mysteries that are inimical to human vanity." (39)
-"This is the only afterlife of which we have evidence- the transmission of human experience and thought." (44)
-"I have written, briefly, in fiction, on Hiroshima and the bomb. In my own life, the event was a confused beginning of pacifism. And also of an awareness that immense evils are impossible to hold in the mind. One's own contemplation of them can carry dangers of posturing, of easy vehemence, and of claims of unearned morality. By contrast, acts of goodness- even of public goodness- can only be properly discussed or understood in their individual manifestations. The dominant proposition of the atomic age-that humankind is doomed by its own evil-cannot be refuted with any single sweeping show of virtue analogous to the bomb. To counter the implications of the bomb, humanity can offer its history of individual gestures-the proofs of decency, pity, integrity, and independent courage." (145)
-"I cannot prevent the making of the bomb-although, like others, I may make my protest. I cannot prevent the use of it. My faith is, merely, that the world against which the bomb may be used has not entirely deserved it." (145) <- !!!!
Some quotes:
-"Everyone who writes is asked at some stage, Why? Some writers give answers to that question, but I wonder if it is truly answerable. If ther eis a worthy response, it would to my mind have to do with a wish to close the discrepancy between human experience, with all its strangeness of the mind, as it is known to each of us, and as it is generally expressed. We live in a time when past concepts of an order larger than the self are dwindling away or have disappeared--the deference of the human species and of societies to nationhood, to social systems. The testimony of the accurate word is perhaps the last great mystery to which we can make ourselves accessible, to which we can still subscribe." (3)
-"Articulation is central to human survival and self-determination, not only in its commemorative and descriptive functions but in relieving the soul of incoherence." <--What an argument to continue battling with words to meet our need for expression...! To outsource that process is to surrender to our own incoherence, or accept an arbitrary external authority's promise of relief
-"In its preoccupation with the root of life, language has special responsibilities. Its manipulation, and deviation from true meaning, can be more meaningful than in the case of other arts." (4)
-"Without diminishing the merits and advantages of brevity... literature cannot be looked on as a competition to employ as few words as possible. Rather it is a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a human condition... that is the proper and agonizing business of literature, in which much of the writer's suffering originates: 'the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,' as T.T. Eliot called it." (5)
-"I have said that language bears special responsibilities: the writer's vigilance over language and attention to language are themselves an assumption of responsibility... Our words, whether in literature or in life, are accepted as a revelation of our private nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility we are prepared to assume for it." (6)
-"Along with the transforming power of technology and mass society, there developed in the nineteenth centruy a sort of Industrial Revolution in human expression- an increasing tendency to renounce personal opinion in favor of generalized or official opinion, and to evade self-knowledge and self-commitment through use of abstractions: a wish, in fact, to believe in some process of feeling more efficient than the human soul. There was also an associated new phenomenon of mass communications and mass advertising- that, of new words and usages not spontaneously but speciously brought into wide circulation as a means of profitably directing the human impulse. (The word "jargon," incidentally, anciently derives from the twittering of geese.") (7)
-"Art is not technology and cannot be "mastered." It is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of the living experience and a way of communicating with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone." (8)
-"the power of a work of art ultimately derives not form classifiable components but from an enigmatic quality of synthesis, which does not lend itself to analysis." (9)
-"The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. We all need silence-both external and interior-in order to find out what we truly think." (10)
-"It is not, of course, the business of an artist to give satisfaction as if he were some sort of home appliance, but to enlarge our sensation and perception of life." (14)
-"Much of this encroachment of abstract language derives from a modern inability for wholeness; a modern incapacity for synthesis. While it poses as a higher seriousness, abstraction is perhaps another stage in the long attempt to neutralize the mysteries that are inimical to human vanity." (39)
-"This is the only afterlife of which we have evidence- the transmission of human experience and thought." (44)
-"I have written, briefly, in fiction, on Hiroshima and the bomb. In my own life, the event was a confused beginning of pacifism. And also of an awareness that immense evils are impossible to hold in the mind. One's own contemplation of them can carry dangers of posturing, of easy vehemence, and of claims of unearned morality. By contrast, acts of goodness- even of public goodness- can only be properly discussed or understood in their individual manifestations. The dominant proposition of the atomic age-that humankind is doomed by its own evil-cannot be refuted with any single sweeping show of virtue analogous to the bomb. To counter the implications of the bomb, humanity can offer its history of individual gestures-the proofs of decency, pity, integrity, and independent courage." (145)
-"I cannot prevent the making of the bomb-although, like others, I may make my protest. I cannot prevent the use of it. My faith is, merely, that the world against which the bomb may be used has not entirely deserved it." (145) <- !!!!
May 3, 2022
I admit to some picking and choosing, but what I picked rated a 4 or more -- particularly the title essay, her essay on Tuscany, and the comments she made at the 2003 National Book Awards gathering. In that last, she gently chided Stephen King for his apparent dismissal (reverse snobbery) of "literature." Basically: there's room for all. Instead, she celebrated the variety of tastes of both writers and readers, and their mutual love of language.
September 5, 2020
Dame Leonie Kramer AO says of Shirley Hazzard - her conviction is that “institutional morality, like personal morality, is an indispensable principle of civil life.” Reading one of the chapters led me to the lecture Kramer gave called The Prodigal Daughter that examines the treatment of Australian writers as expats. Hazzard’s books are full of expats and outsiders.
October 24, 2016
I received this book as a First Read. It's an intellectual collection of essays. There's an interesting discussion of literature and public policy. The writing can be a bit dry and academic at times and this book would be well suited as a required book in a college course. Fans of classic literature or magazines like The New Yorker will enjoy this read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews