The first time I heard that art is long was in my 10th grade American Literature class. I didn’t get it then, and as my teacher made no attempt to interpret it beyond scanning the line (stressed, unstressed, stressed), I don’t know that she did, either. It’s from the fourth stanza of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life.”
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
The phrase stayed with me, perhaps because I found it strange.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, and I was last week years old when I Googled it and found out Longfellow was quoting the Greek physician Hippocrates, of Hippocratic Oath fame. It’s from his Aphorism: Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. According to the internet, it can mean
- Art survives longer than the artist. (If we’re lucky.)
- It takes a long time to attain proficiency in a field, leaving us with a short time to practice well. (You’re not joking there, Hippocrates).
I think it has another meaning, too.
3. Art takes a long time.
Eleven years ago, I started writing the book that would eventually become The Last Sister. It was published seven years ago this fall, about fourteen months after the publisher accepted it. That’s a quick turnaround in the publishing world.
I started another novel as soon as I finished that one, which seems, looking back, ill-advised. Actually I started several novels as I parented my young daughter and worked as a freelance educational writer. Eventually I gave up and wrote many short pieces—essays, poems, that sort of thing. I moved across the country. I tried Nanowrimo a couple of times. I stammered through an answer every time someone asked me if I was writing another book, unsure if I was or not. I gave a lot of my energy and sanity and time to weathering the news cycles of the past half-decade or so.
In early 2018, I stumbled on a story that inspired me—where or how I cannot now remember. It was about the Brisbanes, a minister’s family from Beaufort, South Carolina who became convinced of the evils of slavery and moved to the North in the years prior to the Civil War. William Henry Brisbane later returned to Beaufort with the Union Army as chairman of the U.S. Direct Tax Commission for South Carolina. He had insider knowledge, you see. It’s no surprise that he became known as “The most hated man in Beaufort County.” I absolutely know what it is to be divided from your home by your beliefs, to interpret your religion in a way that means you are no longer welcome to stay. The Brisbanes’ story spoke to me.
The book I’ve been working on since early 2018 is not the Brisbanes’ story, and it isn’t my story, but it is inspired by both. I spent a long weekend in the summer of 2018 sketching out the book. Then I hired a writing coach to help me through that incredibly difficult first draft, to force me to do it and to tell me when my work was good or bad and to remind me that most readers don’t really know much of anything about the Civil War except that it happened.
I finished that first draft in May 2019. Then I finished a second draft in May 2020. Then, physically and emotionally exhausted by the pandemic and my second pregnancy, and fearing that Civil War history had become such a hot button that write about it at all was to ask the social media trolls to come after me, and fed up with the entire publishing system, I quit. I still wrote quite a bit, but I quit the novel for a while.
And since we’re all talking about quitting after Simone Biles’ choice to stop competing this week, let me tell you how highly I recommend quitting. Sometimes quitting is the exact right thing to do. Sometimes “butt in chair” is just a waste of time. Something was wrong with that book, and I didn’t know what it was, and I couldn’t figure it out nor did I have the energy to try, and I admire anyone, including myself, who puts their physical and mental health first.
Over a year later, last week in fact, in the far North Country of New York where my husband’s family has a remote cabin that we sometimes visit in the summer, I figured it out. The book has two major settings and one of them was in the wrong place. I’m ready to go back to that book now, to make it all that I know I can be. Most advice about writing will tell you it’s always hard and you just have to do it, but I say you also have to know yourself and your work and understand that sometimes art takes a long time. There are writers out there who are really fast, and sometimes I’m one of them, but not this time.
I can control only so much, and art has its own timeline.
Sometimes art is long.
I’m glad I figured that out, and if you ask me how my book is coming, I might just tell you art is long.