The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis.

May, The Courage to Create, page 21

Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.

May, The Courage to Create, page 40

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

May, The Courage to Create, page 93

And:

When I am engaged in writing something important to me, I find that if I engage in the customary twenty-minute meditation period before writing, my universe has become too straightened out, too orderly. Then I have nothing to write about. My encounter has vanished into thin air. My “problems” are all solved. I feel bliss, to be sure; but I cannot write.

May, The Courage to Create, page 94

Apropos of the noise:

We live in a world that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree. Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability, and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and irrational is already an inevitable threat to bourgeois order and uniformity.

May, The Courage to Create, page 68

And:

What people do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious world. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit,” as the physicist Heisenberg puts it.

May, The Courage to Create, page 68

I like that phrase: “uncertain in the impulses of the spirit.” An “impulse” can be defined as a desire to act, or a force that causes a change in momentum. Rote mechanization pushes against that force and keeps you on the same path, when perhaps you should have veered off.

In The Courage to Create, Rollo May shares a story from Jules Henri Poincaré, writing in his autobiography. In it, Poincaré describes many long days trying to sort out some mathematical question and finding no solution. When he finally becomes overwhelmed with failure, he skips town and goes to the beach. There, while walking, he has a sudden epiphany about the math that had previously escaped him. Of the experience, Poincaré writes:

Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to be incontestable, and traces of it would be found in other cases where it is less evident. Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness.

May, The Courage to Create, page 64

And yet, it’s not rest alone that made the idea arrive, but the oscillation of effort and rest. Poincaré continues:

These sudden inspirations…never happen except after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. These efforts have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing.

May, The Courage to Create, page 65

Just as importantly, the rest has certain characteristics. Here is May:

I propose that in our day this alternation...requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a world that is “too much with us,” that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in us.

May, The Courage to Create, page 66

This brings to mind a note from The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, who asserts that:

Today we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; “betweens” and “between-time” are lacking. Acceleration is abolishing all intervals.

Han, The Burnout Society, page 22

Poincaré’s epiphany required the interval, the between time, the suspension of expectation and structure. It wasn’t enough that he worked long and hard at a problem; it wasn’t enough that he took some time to rest; it was necessary, also, for him to go to the sea, to walk along the bluff—to welcome solitude and to let it do its work.

Without the interval, there is no solitude; without solitude, the unconscious machine sputters and gasps. Over time, I fear that the gears begin to rust, and it becomes harder to start it up again. But not impossible. Never impossible.

There’s a joke about a writer and her therapist that I’ve seen various versions of over the years. The writer complains about how terrible the writing is, how difficult it is to show up each day, how the writing is blocked, the writing is bad, she can’t sleep or eat or think. Every day the thought of trying to write wrecks her; every day she vows to do better, to write more, and then the day ends with writing that isn’t enough, isn’t any good, isn’t what she wanted.

Exasperated, the therapist finally suggests that she could stop writing. “Stop?” says the writer, blinking in surprise.

“Yes,” says the therapist.

There’s a long pause while the writer works this out. Then she blurts, “Dear gods, that would be worse!”

The joke works because we all know that the curse of the writer (or, of the artist generally) is to find the work of writing to be terrifically difficult while also feeling entirely compelled to pursue it at all costs. The only thing worse than writing, as the saying goes, is not writing.

But what makes it so hard? Rollo May has an idea:

[C]reativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring.

May, The Courage to Create, page 27

Now, there’s an excuse. You haven’t been struggling against a blank page, but going toe-to-toe with Athena. You haven’t been defeated by a metaphor but burned down to cinders by Helios. Your legs hurt not because you’ve been sitting in this chair for so long but because you have chased Poseidon to the bottom of the sea.

Jokes aside, there’s something here, I think. The idea that when we make something—a pleasing sentence or story, a painting, a typeface or lyric or melody—we become like gods, we channel some power through ourselves that allows something to come into the world that wasn’t there before.

It brings to mind this passage from Circe, in which the nymph considers why she has become a witch:

By rights, I should never have come to witchcraft. Gods hate all toil, it is their nature. The closest we come is weaving or smithing, but these things are skills, and there is no drudgery to them since all the parts that might be unpleasant are taken away with power. The wool is dyed not with stinking vats and stirring spoons, but with a snap. There is no tedious mining, the ores leap willing from the mountain. No fingers are ever chafed, no muscles strained.

Witchcraft is nothing but such drudgery. Each herb must be found in its den, harvested at its time, grubbed up from the dirt, culled and stripped, washed and prepared. It must be handled this way, then that, to find out where its power lies. Day upon patient day, you must throw out your errors and begin again. So why did I not mind? Why did none of us mind?

I cannot speak for my brothers and sister, but my answer is easy. For a hundred generations, I had walked a world drowsy and dull, idle and at my ease. I left no prints, I did no deeds. Even those who had loved me a little did not care to stay.

Then I learned that I could bend the world to my will, as a bow is bent for an arrow. I would have done that toil a thousand times to keep such power in my hands. I thought: this is how Zeus felt when he first lifted the thunderbolt.

Miller, Circe, page 83

That is, creativity is so powerful it makes a greater god out of the lesser. Of us, it gives a glimpse of something else—the awareness of being alive right now, truly living, the bone-deep knowledge that the world is a different place with you in it, that your living brings about some change. The power that Circe feels, that we feel—it’s not the power of immortality but rather the power of life.

So the writer’s rebuke is apt: however difficult the work, stopping would indeed be worse.