💬 How Do You Tap Into "Suprapersonal Wisdom?"
Our monthly(ish) community prompt + Milan Kundera on "why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors."
Good morning, Dohnuts! I’m writing to you from the fog of a terrible head cold that hasn’t budged since Tuesday. Forget the spaffice; I’m stuck to the couch sneezing, so congested it’s as if I am submerged under water, and my mood is tanking without being able to exercise (exorcise?) the daily gremlins away.
But alas, the Doh show rolls on—for now! (We’ll see about Wednesday; pardon my absence in advance if I skip a post).
As a follow-up to the three-part series on Publishing Pivots (1, 2, 3), I have been reflecting on the ways my idealized self—who wrote those three books, channeled higher wisdom, and aspired to an optimistic vision of the future—collides with my everyday self, the one who is struggling to maintain even basic health, let alone everything else; the one whose morale sometimes dips dangerously low, even when I knew better. #gratitude #blessed #beherenow
There is a wonderful section I keep returning to in Syracuse professor and super-Substacker ’ enthralling craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.
Saunders describes the contradiction between how the towering nineteenth-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was said to treat his wife (as a workhorse) versus how he showed up in his writing, as “full of compassion.” Saunders says:
“Well, of course, the writer is not the person. The writer is a version of the person who makes a model of the world that may seem to advocate for certain virtues, virtues by which he may not be able to live.”
That’s just it. Authors are only flawed humans, despite the idealized selves we can (if we’re lucky) channel for the work. Confronting this reality is humbling; realizing that despite my best efforts, I often fall short of what I know to be in my highest good.
Right now, responding to a single email feels like climbing Everest, let alone greasing the wheels of any of the smoothly-running systems I describe in Free Time. That said, integrity is a core value of mine, so it hurts when I can’t “walk my talk.”
To elaborate further, Saunders quotes Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being at length (emphasis and line spacing mine):
“Not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman, but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesman for his own ideas.
When Tolstoy sketched the first draft of Anna Karenina, Anna was a most unsympathetic woman, and her tragic end was entirely deserved and justified. The final version of the novel is very different, but I do not believe that Tolstoy had revised his moral ideas in the meantime; I would say, rather, that in the course of writing, he was listening to another voice than that of his personal moral conviction.
He was listening to what I would like to call the wisdom of the novel.
Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.”
Now, maybe (and rightly so) non-fiction authors who are prescribing advice and standing on expertise should be held to a higher standard as a spokesperson for their ideas. But I also believe there will always be a gap between the perfect-on-paper expression of those ideas and their collision with real life.1
This gap is also why projects like have taken off so quickly—because they encourage us to tap into this suprapersonal wisdom, something bigger than us, yet available through us as our pen travels to the page.
Building on our earlier monthly(ish) Community Doh discussion threads, I’d love to hear from you in the comments on any aspect of this conversation:2
💬 How do you access suprapersonal wisdom?
How can you tell when it’s you writing or speaking, or something bigger than you that’s tapping into the collective consciousness?
Have you ever gotten “over your skis” while communicating ideas you believe in, while sometimes failing to live up to them?
Do you agree with Kundera’s statements that “great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors,” and that “novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work”?
💬 Let us know in the comments :)
Note: These are for paid subscribers only, so that Dohnuts can feel more secure in sharing, knowing the stories and comments aren’t publicly searchable. I would love for you to join us!
For more on this gap, check out ’ thought-provoking post, The self-care delusion. “I’ve got self-care practices out the wazoo,” Jonathan writes. “But . . . you cannot self-care your way out of a fundamental misalignment in a core area of your life.”
View earlier discussion prompts—and weigh in any time, it’s never too late!—here:
💬 Community Doh: Discussion Prompts
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