Unanswered    
First published at BlueEar.com on February 20, 2000
by Whitney Stewart

"I thought that after my books were published the hollow of being unpublished, of being incomplete, of being without wisdom would be filled," writes Whitney Stewart . "How many other writers have been so deceived? After your books are published and ordered and wedged into spaces at your favorite bookstores, the hollow only deepens."

Feeling unanswered is a state I have known since childhood.

Since I began believing spirits talked to me in the bathtub and in the forest. Since I knew my stuffed animals had feelings and language as I had. Since the day I saw the spirit of President Lincoln floating next to a beach cabana on Chappaquidick Island after some friends and I summoned him on a Ouija board. Since I started silently conversing with Pequot Indians in the wooded areas near my father's Connecticut house, or with Thoreau at the ruins of his shelter on Walden Pond, or with enigmatic sea creatures in the dark, seaweedy ocean of Hyannisport.

On field trips to Salem, Massachusetts and Plimoth Plantation, I was sure that if I wiped a wall or stepped on the ground that had been touched before by wise ancestors, I would absorb their wisdom effortlessly. In those stiff, refurbished houses of old New England, I hung back behind my classmates and teachers to wait and see if John Alden or Miles Standish would recognize me as his descendant and reveal a family secret that would absolve me.

I felt unanswered and ignorant because I had so many questions; I was obligated to understand something complicated that I'd never heard anyone mention. I wanted wisdom to come easily by my touching the right spot somewhere. I still want that.

As a child, I always felt a wide, unnamed presence. It was a kind of wisdom I could graze with my fingers, dab at with the tip of my tongue, and almost hear with inner ears. But it was a wisdom that was not yet mine. Or, that's what I felt. Maybe it is always ours from before birth, in life, and after death. Maybe it cannot be otherwise.

My father remembers me as a confident, talkative, athletic child not given to silent reflection. I was the child he saw, and I wasn't. I guarded my inner dialogues and shared them with no one. In my home I had a private bathroom that I could lock, and inside there I was the silent, wondering child who felt hollow. I ached for a personal guide to teach me to hear wind, to smell rain, to chatter with crows, to beckon wild animals, to hold secrets with ghosts. I needed meaning beyond myself, but I didn't know that. Not really. I just thought I was incomplete.

Writing became a way to make connections to wisdom and to all other creatures. Writing eased the ache but did not cure it. When, in seventh grade, I wrote a story of an ant from his point of view, an ant that ran dangerously close to the flame of a gas stove, I felt the bug's frenzy and confusion. I wasn't just doing my English homework; I was being an ant. I was talking to an ant, letting the bug know he need not fear me.

In high school, I hoped that by reading great authors I would absorb their talent and their fertile lives. Praying to bypass the grief and torture so many writers feel, I sought a point of equanimity and literary success. That success would not be in seeing the covers of my books in store windows and on bookshelves; it would be in gaining a calm beyond the ache. I thought that after my books were published the hollow of being unpublished, of being incomplete, of being without wisdom would be filled.

How many other writers have been so deceived? After your books are published and ordered and wedged into spaces at your favorite bookstores, the hollow only deepens. Writers then start panicking that their books are overlooked, misjudged by unconcerned reviewers, stuck behind those of flashier writers.

Did I get any closer to the wisdom when my book was reviewed on radio and television? No; my striving only grew more fervent, my sense of alienation stronger, and I had fewer and fewer conversations with my bathtub spirits.

If I constantly fill my head with inner dialogues about royalties, contracts, hot new ideas, first- versus third-person narrative, how will I hear the great wisdom when it comes swooping into my mind unannounced? I don't know. Writing makes connections, but the business of writing can break them.

I think I became a biographer because of my passion for people-watching. Before writing books, I used to sit in Howard Johnson's after midnight and listen to bits of conversation. Hiding behind novels, I studied strangers and made up lives for them. I analyzed people's clothing, judged their character by the food they ordered, compared their gestures and speech patterns to my own.

I need to know how others reach a point of equanimity, how they experience the banal and overcome nightmares. When I finally took up biography writing, I wanted to know if Sir Edmund Hillary got good grades or if the Dalai Lama was afraid of bugs. I wondered just how Aung San Suu Kyi dealt with the separation from her family. Did she ever cry at night? What remedy did the Manchu Empress Dowager take when she had indigestion? Did Deng Xiaoping despise Mao Zedong?

I like to imagine myself in someone else's life and then feel relief that I am in my own. Through reading and writing biography, I examine human nature and cultural patterns. I learn how history is a collection of personal stories that comes undone like a fistful of pick-up sticks dropped from a child's hand. I can't remove a single thin stick without displacing another. I don't win the game for grabbing one stick and leaving the collection behind. Biography is history and history, biography. Both encase the flame and intrigue of human existence.

Whitney Stewart has written young adult biographies of Sir Edmund Hillary, the 14th Dalai Lama, Aung San Suu Kyi and Deng Xiaoping, all published by Lerner Publications.