Inspiration

This blog post...
1. Involves a list, well, 2 lists, if you include this one. *Cue oohs and ahhs and cheering because lists are fun and exciting and a new thing I'm trying, and we like new things.* I'm really bad at keeping listed items short and to the point. I'm also pretty bad at keeping them separate from each other, so it's really not that much of a list, but more like my thoughts in a list-y format with numbers. However, this blog is mine all mine and I will do what I want here.
2. Is much more of a journal entry than my past few blogs. Read on, and you'll see into my mind.
3. Is an attempt to ignore the Arthurian Legends essay that I must finish before noon tomorrow.
4. May be titled "Inspiration," but holds no cheesy inspirational quotes. I promise.
5. Is fueled by some really bad coffee that I made in my french press, with grounds that were left over from the PERFECT french press I had previously made (with the very last of my coffee), and then promptly spilled. All this to say, this blog is fueled by caffeine and too-much-essaying-in-one-day.


Inspiration is a funny thing, I've been finding.

I think when I came to Europe, I had this idea that I was going to be inspired, by the sights I saw, by the people I met, and by the places I went. And I have been, but one thing I've noticed is that inspiration is fleeting, and it most definitely cannot be forced. You can walk along the Seine all day and all night, and if you are not in the right state of mind, it's just a dirty river (still prettier than the Thames, though).

Inspiration is so much harder to pin down than I used to think. Maybe it's just me, but I can't just look at something and feel automatically inspired. Even when I was in the "Water Lilies" rooms at Musée de l'Orangerie, surrounded by the most beautiful things I had ever seen that were created by the hands of man, I did not draw inspiration directly from it. The paintings made me feel awed, excited, proud to be a human, because Claude Monet was a human, and even almost made me cry because I had wanted to see them for so long. But rather than inspire me directly, I think they were just poured into a vast pool of things that I have seen and touched and experienced in my life, and from that pool of sensations and dreams and memories and words, comes everything good that I have ever created.

I had this idea about Paris… that I would be inspired there, because F. Scott Fitzgerald and Earnest Hemingway were. I dreamt that by walking along the banks of the Seine and popping into random bookshops, I would feel what T. S. Eliot felt. Maybe I did, who knows? I didn't find the magical Jazz Age Paris that I read about in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, but I did have some pretty cool experiences of my own while I was there. Just because I was in the same places as these great writers-writers that I admire (I might even say my three favorite writers, who have shaped my own writing more than any others), does not mean I can produce what they produced, nor does it mean that I should. I do not want to produce things that have already been written. I do not want my work to be passé.

Even while I did not necessarily "feel inspired" while walking the streets of Paris, and hopping on trains, and seeing all kinds of new and exciting things, since I've been back home in Glasgow, I've been writing more than I've written all semester. Ruminating on my travels has certainly sparked something.


Here are a few of the things that I think inspire me most of all:

1. A sunny day, and a friend with whom I can walk the streets of my city, and just enjoy it together and marvel at things which, if we didn't take the time to marvel at them, could have become normal, every-day things by now. It inspires me to still find new things here, in a place that has become home.

2. Deadlines. No, this isn't what you think. It's actually kind of the opposite. Whenever I am forced to sit down at my computer and write an essay that is due very soon, I sit down, I get distracted, I start to type, and type, and then research a little, and then I type some more.

Then, invariably, something annoying, but also awesome happens. Ideas start to pop into my head. These ideas are not in any way related to the essay I'm writing, but instead, are related to whatever creative project I'm currently working on. If I'm not working on anything, they're great ideas for short stories or novels I could start working on. Then, I inevitably put the essay aside and write for hours, for the creative, non-school related project, because, in the end, isn't that why I'm going to school, why I'm writing essays and reading classical literature, and why I am sitting under the tutelage of people who are supposedly smarter and better at these things than I am, or at least have Doctorate degrees where I have no degrees?! Wow, long sentence. Seriously. I'm out of breath.

This is a problem that I've lamented about so much my friend Robin recently threatened to assign essays to me after I graduate, so that I'll have something to spur me into writing what I want to write. It seems like an okay way to get around writer's block; am I right?

3. Reminiscing. Reminiscing about the past, especially since I've been here in Glasgow, puts me in such a great mood. I'm not talking about the far distant past, I'm talking about stuff that happened, oh four or five months ago. I'm talking about things that are still happening, an ocean away in the little city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Going back home, to the people I love most, and seeing what has changed and what is still the same, excites me. This is ironic because a big part of the reason I want to travel the world is to pull inspiration from everything I see. While I'm over here, gallivanting about, the familiar things are the things that get to me.

4. My favorite authors. I think what I realized in my wee Parisian search for the things Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, and Eliot were inspired by, is that they have already inspired me. Their works inspire me enough to want to see the things they saw. I'd say that's a pretty good measure of how awesome their work is. In the same way, I searched for James Joyce in his native Dublin, amidst the flurry of St. Paddy's Day festivities. Jack Kerouac made me want to strike out on a road trip across the west and I will probably go to The Eagle and the Child in Oxford, because C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien chilled there. I am even planning to go to the tourist trap that is Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of one William Shakespeare. Their work is what makes these places exciting. That's why my one "big" souvenir from my backpacking trip was a gorgeous book of Fitzgerald short stories. It is not because of where he wrote them, but what he wrote.

5. A worship session. Being in church on Sunday for the first time in a few weeks actually had me near tears, it was so good to be back. The older I get, the more I have a tendency toward worrying, and yes, I know age is no excuse, but it happens. Just sitting down and delving into the Word, or singing worship songs in a church that already feels familiar, lifts that worry right off my shoulders and puts me in a much better state of mind. It's crazy how much I take on, completely forgetting to trust in God, but He is faithful in my life, again and again, no matter how faithless I am.

6. T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I just recommended this poem to someone, and then of course read it again, and was struck by how much it has inspired me. If there is one poem I would force every millennial to read, it is this one. I look at my generation and see inactivity and passivity and the decay of society, but Eliot was writing it about his own generation a century ago, and I guess he saw the same thing.

I first remember reading this poem in one of my high school English classes, and I don't remember much, besides my teacher trying to explain the correlation between the questions "Do I dare disturb the universe?" and "Do I dare to eat a peach?" to us, and we all just stared back at him like he was crazy because it was easier to just make it through the 40 minutes without caring or really learning anything (ahem, passivity). I think I read the poem once more my freshman year of college and liked it a little more, but it was last year, in my favorite professor's class, that I read this poem and felt deeply convicted by it. I saw myself so clearly in Prufrock. One might say this poem is the reason studying abroad changed from being a dream/possibility into a reality. One might say this poem is the reason the novel I'm currently working on is actually being worked on, and not just sitting dejected and untouched, in a wee folder on my desktop.

If you read the poem and can't figure out what I'm talking about, read it again. If you read the poem and think the line "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons," is a good thing, or something that belongs on a cutsey sign, I will treat you to my loudest, most exasperated sigh. (I have seen this on Etsy and it makes me sad.)

7. Finding something I wrote months or years ago, that is good. The most exciting and inspiring feeling I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, is finding a quote I jotted down somewhere, and then googling it to see who said it, and realizing no one said it. Or no one ever wrote it down in a blog, or published it, or said it in a movie. The thing that inspires me most of all is realizing a quote I thought was cool enough to look up, actually originated with me.

Now I have told you a few of the things that inspire me. What inspires you?

xx

Carrie Sue Wagler