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What Remains

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Over the last few days, I’ve taken some very long walks, several naps, and I’ve read What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, trans. and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill (LiverightPubl, 2025). It is being hailed as “a landmark literary event.” The poems, presented in the original German and in English, were never intended by Arendt for publication, and they don’t strike me as being poems one memorizes or writes out in a commonplace book. They compel, however, if taken as a diary of Arendt’s life:

The thoughts come to me,
I’m no longer a stranger to them.
I grow into their dwelling
like a plowed field.

(from Part II, 1942-1961)

If you aren’t already steeped in Hannah Arendt’s work, the footnotes and the introduction of What Remains are a necessary guide. Additionally, they offer the editors’ obsession with the poetry, and a direct look into one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.

In the introduction, Hill (a biographer of Arendt) explains that “Arendt wrote poems to record events, reflect on experiences,” but also to “engage in what she called ‘the free play of thinking.’” And it is this play of thinking that stood out to me. She was as a young woman a star student (and lover) of Martin Heidegger, but when other intellectuals embraced Naziism and Totalitarianism, she turned away in despair. I wonder to what extent her poetry kept alive her desire to be the thinker she became. Whatever the case, the paragraph describing how she carried her poems with her as she fled France, and then Europe, and came to the U. S. is worth highlighting.

As a young woman, Arendt was steeped in the German poets, and found in English writers, including W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, and Randall Jarrell, “her tribe.” Hill writes:

“It wasn’t that Arendt wrote poems because she was a student of poetry who was taught to write poems, or because she fancied herself a secret poet, or because she felt the muse speaking through her. Though, who is to say. Arendt wrote poems because she had found in them a language that allowed her to weave together thinking and experience.”

—Samantha Rose Hill

I am giving this book to a friend for Christmas, so in order not to mark it up I wrote many paragraphs into my morning notebook. And some of the poems found their way in, too. This line, for instance:

“We need only ignite our grief,”

If you’d like to retrace my steps, I stumbled onto this book at LitHub: https://lithub.com/snapshots-in-verse-on-hannah-arendts-long-lost-poems/

While you’re at it, look up the 2012 film, Hannah Arendt, depicting the writing of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt_(film). I have an old blog post about seeing the film, and about writing and thinking more generally,

image from Pexels

By the way, I consider poets my tribe, too.

Whatever you celebrate at this darkest time of year, you are in my thoughts. Thank you for being here.

 

How do you work?

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Hannah-ArendtLast night I went to the Women in Cinema presentation of Hannah Arendt, a film by Margarethe von Trotta. (Click on the link to see the trailer.) The main story — well, that’s the reason to see the film. But there’s another story that unfolds, which is about how one writes. Lots of cigarettes. Lying down and closing one’s eyes. Hannah Arendt was also a professor, and she kept a pretty busy social calendar (friends with both W.H. Auden and Mary McCarthy!).

On our way home, my friend asked me how I write. She wanted to know, specifically, how it is that 15 minutes is all I can manage. “I know you read lots of books. You watch TV with your girls. Couldn’t you write more than 15 minutes a day?”

You’d think so. I didn’t know quite what to say. Don’t I love to write? Why don’t I write all the time, every spare minute? What exactly is my work habit?

I scribble more than I write. Writing the blog is a kind of scribbling, or just one step up from it. I can sit with a journal and fill page after page — when I allow myself to.

Sometimes I write in my journal about my writing. I write about how reading Frankenstein or The Witch of Blackbird Pond gave me an idea for a scene in my novel. Sometimes I’ll ask myself a question about what a character should do, or what outlandish event — that I haven’t yet thought of — I could put in. 

My fifteen minute practice has been purely to do actual writing, notebook open on my lap, pen in hand, scene underway. For some reason, this invention has always been the hardest part of my process and I almost have to trick myself to get it done. Once it’s down on the page, then I have a great time fussing over it and making it better.

Oh, getting it typed up is the intermediate step, and that gives me trouble, too.

greenchairWhat I find with the 15 minutes of “live” writing every morning is that I tend to be more concrete in my daydreaming about the novel throughout the rest of the day. That’s my goal right now. At some point, my time will break wide open and I’ll get four or five hours and make huge progress getting clean pages typed up and printed.

I will not compare myself to Hannah Arendt, one of the great minds of the twentieth century. I can’t claim to be a great thinker (though I’d like to think I’m a good one). And I don’t  smoke. But writing is one of those human activities that seems to require one to spend time doing something else — as if in a deliberate attempt to catch the mind off guard. That’s what I’m doing when I’m not doing my 15 minutes.