Katharine Butler Hathaway
Katharine Butler Hathaway wrote one book, The Little Locksmith. It was published a few months after she died. Three years later, The Journals and Letters of the Little Locksmith was published. I have a first edition. There may have been only one. The price on the back: $2.50. An incredible bargain for such a treasure. I’ve just finished rereading it. I thought I’d share a few excerpts from this rare volume.
From a letter to a friend and fellow artist:
“You and I both suffered from wrong beginnings, and it seems to me we represent something and can express something that is valuable, and you have, and will again. Don’t despair. Everybody does despair, though. That is one of the symptoms of being an artist. The more sensitive and well endowed you are, the less likely that you will be understood as you wish to be.”
This lengthy passage is from her journals. I couldn’t bear to cut it down anymore. You’re welcome:
“(T)he mysterious and grand forces which intermittently visit a human being-like sleep and love and artistic creation-are absolutely incompatible with coercion. It is frightfully arrogant and conceited to believe that you can grab these things when you want them. The only way you can receive them is to cultivate humility forever and ever and ever, world without end. Also, you must be as patient as the earth.
“In order to have a foundation for your life to rest on, you have to have a sense of devotion in your life. You have to make this, too. It won’t happen itself. You will be even more humble in front of your own poor possessions, and in humility you will be absolutely glorified. You will not necessarily choose asceticism, but you will see Divine mystery in each manifestation. To see in the kitten a most lovely and important mystery-to see in you the beauty which is, in a sense, your own, but in a greater sense not your own but the beauty created for you by all the mysterious forces both external and internal which have ever touched you and to be aware even in myself of another mystery and another sacredness-even in my body because it represents truthfully the principle in Nature of imperfection. The inexplicable cause behind all the burden and the irony and the physical, inexplicable, and cruel torment in human life.
“The change of life is the time when you meet yourself at a crossroads and you decide whether to be honest or not before you die. Yourself, your whole life, up to now, is gathered together, gathered up in a knot. All the different sides of your nature seem to assert themselves at once, as if every part of you were striving for recognition and striving to be one whole person-all recognized and all acting together in good harmony. So your old angers rise up, and you can’t be meek and mild any more because you are awake suddenly and being meek and mild would not be sincere.”
Is your mind blown as mine is?
Here she is on craft:
“I wish my writing may be alive-not just in texture, but like an organic, live thing in itself, like a branch of a living tree, startlingly alive like a bough of apple blossoms that somebody breaks off and carries into the house. Language is so stale, I have to keep pruning, cutting out deadness, letting it lie for a while, then pick it up again and see where it is dead, prune it and prune it, let it grow, then let it lie.”
A pithier restatement of part of the above passage:
“The secret on the breath which enrages all those who also have a secret…it is like a defiance…insulting the others.” (ellipsis in the original)
As I’ve written here before, it is easy enough to know the truth; living it is very, very hard. Be prepared for the tidal wave of resentment generated by all those who’ve chosen to live to other people’s expectations rather than their own truth. They will hate you for having the courage to do what they can’t find the courage to do themselves. But take heart, a few will be inspired. They will take courage from your courage.
And finally:
“I can’t deny it or pretend it’s not so, mine was a life of failure-one thing after another-like most lives…but that is all right, it is universal, it is the great human experience to fail.” (ellipsis in the original)
It shows we can never really know the impact of our own actions. We may see ourselves as failures, and yet the reverberations of our efforts may be felt decades after we are gone.
I feel amazed that someone from a different era, with a life so divergent from mine, could experience living so much as I do. I’m grateful she took the time to write it down so that I could know.
From a letter to a friend and fellow artist:
“You and I both suffered from wrong beginnings, and it seems to me we represent something and can express something that is valuable, and you have, and will again. Don’t despair. Everybody does despair, though. That is one of the symptoms of being an artist. The more sensitive and well endowed you are, the less likely that you will be understood as you wish to be.”
This lengthy passage is from her journals. I couldn’t bear to cut it down anymore. You’re welcome:
“(T)he mysterious and grand forces which intermittently visit a human being-like sleep and love and artistic creation-are absolutely incompatible with coercion. It is frightfully arrogant and conceited to believe that you can grab these things when you want them. The only way you can receive them is to cultivate humility forever and ever and ever, world without end. Also, you must be as patient as the earth.
“In order to have a foundation for your life to rest on, you have to have a sense of devotion in your life. You have to make this, too. It won’t happen itself. You will be even more humble in front of your own poor possessions, and in humility you will be absolutely glorified. You will not necessarily choose asceticism, but you will see Divine mystery in each manifestation. To see in the kitten a most lovely and important mystery-to see in you the beauty which is, in a sense, your own, but in a greater sense not your own but the beauty created for you by all the mysterious forces both external and internal which have ever touched you and to be aware even in myself of another mystery and another sacredness-even in my body because it represents truthfully the principle in Nature of imperfection. The inexplicable cause behind all the burden and the irony and the physical, inexplicable, and cruel torment in human life.
“The change of life is the time when you meet yourself at a crossroads and you decide whether to be honest or not before you die. Yourself, your whole life, up to now, is gathered together, gathered up in a knot. All the different sides of your nature seem to assert themselves at once, as if every part of you were striving for recognition and striving to be one whole person-all recognized and all acting together in good harmony. So your old angers rise up, and you can’t be meek and mild any more because you are awake suddenly and being meek and mild would not be sincere.”
Is your mind blown as mine is?
Here she is on craft:
“I wish my writing may be alive-not just in texture, but like an organic, live thing in itself, like a branch of a living tree, startlingly alive like a bough of apple blossoms that somebody breaks off and carries into the house. Language is so stale, I have to keep pruning, cutting out deadness, letting it lie for a while, then pick it up again and see where it is dead, prune it and prune it, let it grow, then let it lie.”
A pithier restatement of part of the above passage:
“The secret on the breath which enrages all those who also have a secret…it is like a defiance…insulting the others.” (ellipsis in the original)
As I’ve written here before, it is easy enough to know the truth; living it is very, very hard. Be prepared for the tidal wave of resentment generated by all those who’ve chosen to live to other people’s expectations rather than their own truth. They will hate you for having the courage to do what they can’t find the courage to do themselves. But take heart, a few will be inspired. They will take courage from your courage.
And finally:
“I can’t deny it or pretend it’s not so, mine was a life of failure-one thing after another-like most lives…but that is all right, it is universal, it is the great human experience to fail.” (ellipsis in the original)
It shows we can never really know the impact of our own actions. We may see ourselves as failures, and yet the reverberations of our efforts may be felt decades after we are gone.
I feel amazed that someone from a different era, with a life so divergent from mine, could experience living so much as I do. I’m grateful she took the time to write it down so that I could know.