“It’s just a question of whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope.”
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I don’t work on an epic scale, although my ambitions run more to epic proportions than I’d like to admit.
It is a question of focus. I don’t really see it on an epic scale, not in the way of Tolstoy and Morrison and García Márquez.
I am connected differently. I look at the train before I look at the continent it passes by. In that case, I see the passengers before I see the train. I see the whole as the aggregation of its details. I can’t see it any other way.
When I was younger, I punished myself for this. I worried (why leave any room for worry?) that I was and always would be a mediocre writer.
I don’t spend much time worrying about it anymore. Writing is hard enough without including the imperative to become the writer you want to be.
This is helped by the fact that for some time I have believed that big vs small is not the clearest way to differentiate in books from They Books.
For example, if you wanted to learn about late nineteenth-century Russia, you might have read histories and biographies, but you might also have read Chekhov, Turgenev, and others. You’ll want to know about the divorce laws that led to Anna Karenina’s decision to go to the opera with Vronsky, and how Akaki Akakievich’s embarrassment about his poverty seals his fate in Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”
Of course, these are all Chief writer, but to a certain extent his importance arises from his interest in those who did not rule, govern or command.
Historians record Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in October 1812, during which at least half a million French soldiers died from exposure and hunger. Pick up a soldier who is caught in a storm, and is still imagining he can escape, and get home again. Without imagination, we cannot know any details of the home he longs for. What we may not know is that his anxiously waiting father regrets every spanking he gives his son, and he will do whatever he can to make sure the boy knows he is loved. We may not know that the soldier, who is unsure of his girlfriend, intends to propose to her immediately after she walks out the door.
Writing is hard enough without including the imperative to become the writer you want to be.
The soldier will not survive. We must know of her death, wrapped in snow, under a night sky scattered with almost painfully bright stars. We must learn about the ways in which her death changed the lives of her father, her girlfriend, and everyone else whose lives were intertwined with hers. Let us be reminded that each one of the five lakh soldiers killed has left a void that will never be filled.
We imagine those lives, but we know enough about them to trust our instincts.
Someone has to discover new continents. Someone else needs to discover never-before-seen flora and fauna native to new continents.
While trying to be a painter I learned that your arms and hands move in different shaped arcs. Your arm can move across the surface of the canvas in broad strokes, or you can paint with your hand and wrist. The former painter makes larger paintings, the latter makes smaller paintings.
It is innate. If you’re a big painter and you try to work small, your paintings are likely to seem claustrophobic. If you’re a small painter and you try to do a larger work, your paintings are likely to feel weak, faded.
I would hate to argue about Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring Either higher or lower than Rembrandt night watchHowever the girl with the earring is a simple portrait of an unknown girl, and night watch It depicts a historical event involving nineteen figures, a dog, and a hen (yes, a hen).
I realized that I was drawn to Virginia Woolf because she was one of the first writers to insist that there is no such thing as an unimportant life; One of the first to indicate that the motion of galaxies is neither more nor less important than the motion of subatomic particles. It’s just a question of whether you’re looking through a telescope or a microscope.
If there are no insignificant lives, there are simply inadequate ways of looking at them. From Emma Bovary to Clarissa Dalloway to Macon Dead, we as readers are reminded that scale is irrelevant. In the hands of a writer like Woolf, a society wife might even one day stand in support of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. For Wolf, the lives of “ordinary” people are neither more nor less important than the lives of world leaders and great artists.
There is this also.
I was immediately drawn to Woolf’s insistence on the relativity of human affairs. As she said, “For (Clarissa) was a child, … and at the same time a grown woman was coming to her parents who were standing by the lake, holding her life in her arms, which as she came closer to them, grew bigger and bigger in her arms, until she became a whole life, a perfect life, which she laid down to them and said, ‘This is what I have made of it! This!'”
We, writers, readers, and everyone, whether we love our lives or not, are forced to watch time ruin everything. This is our beauty and tragedy. We try to see beyond the horizon to the horizon. We do our thing, we fall in love, we make plans and harbor the most extravagant hopes, even though we know where it’s all going.
We are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our little life is surrounded by a sleep.
I’m not going to argue with Shakespeare.
Like any writer, I have spent my life trying to save time, so that other people can open the book and not only see but also feel what comes out of the pages; smell and taste; To hear, even if lightly, songs that no one has sung in a century or more.
We persist in trying, even though we know that almost all of our efforts will fail to some extent.
It’s like trying to drive a nail into a pond of mercury.
I wish I could tell you why I, we, do this. It has to do with explaining yourself to others about the world. Different writers do this for different reasons, but I suspect this romantic relationship to reality is common to all of us. I do this because when you read this sentence, you are listening to me, just as I am trying to hear you, trying to imagine you, no matter how far away we are from each other in time and space.
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from the book unsayable By Michael Cunningham. Copyright © 2026 by Mare Vaporum Corporation. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
