Etty Hillesum and bountifulness—even now

100 Days of Creative Resistance

This is a cross-post with 100 Days of Creative Resistance—a Writing Co-Lab project delivering “a free email of encouragement, opposition, and commiseration — a reminder of why we write and create — from 100 iconoclastic contemporary voices on each of the first 100 days of the 47th president’s regime.” To receive upcoming emails from Nadia Owusu, Lisa Ko, Temim Fruchter, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Hannah Lillith Asadi, Crystal Hana Kim, Laura van den Berg, and many more, sign up here.

I was recently asked to choose a quote to share with the January, 2025 graduates of the Randolph College Low Residency MFA, where I teach. The below is an adapted version of the short speech I gave at that graduation, explaining why I selected this quote from An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum:

This morning I am wonderfully peaceful. Just like a storm that has spent itself. I have noticed that this always happens following days of intense inner striving after clarity, birth pangs with sentences and thoughts that refuse to be born and make tremendous demands on you. Then suddenly it all drops away, all of it, and a benevolent tiredness enters the brain, then everything feels calm again, then I am filled with a sort of bountifulness, even toward myself, and a veil envelops me through which life seems more serene and often much friendlier as well.

In the last couple of months, I’ve had several conversations with writers who are wondering whether their work still matters, or will still matter, in the face of what’s happening politically in this country and in the world. I’ve had my own moments of doubt, too.

So when I was asked to choose a quote to share, I knew I wanted to find something that would speak to our particular moment, something to remind you in the coming years, no matter what happens, that yes, this work—your work—matters.

I went looking for a quote about how necessary art is, how astonishingly powerful the act of speaking the truth is in a world that would distort it into something unrecognizable. The first place I looked was Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” which I think every writer should revisit occasionally.

I kept looking because I thought a writer who had lived under fascism specifically might have some words for us to hold onto. So I turned to An Interrupted Life, the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who lived in Holland in the early ‘40s—who described the rising tide of Nazis and their Holocaust alongside thoughts about her work as a translator and writer, and her romantic entanglements, and her family. I was looking for a line about how writing helped her hold onto her humanity in dehumanizing times, or something like that.

What I found instead was this passage, about writing bringing her joy. And importantly, it was not the result that brought her joy—not the significance of communicating something to generations to come, or impacting the world around her through writing. It was the process. The “intense inner striving after clarity.” That brought her joy.

I do believe that we can save each other’s lives with stories and poems and books. I really do. But Etty reminded me that we don’t have to do all that for this work to matter, even in the darkest times. That your work matters even if all it accomplishes is providing a bright spot in your own life. A sort of bountifulness.

Etty died in Auschwitz two years after she wrote this, at the age of 29. Her writing didn’t save her life, or the lives of her friends and family. And I’m sorry that my attempt at a hopeful, uplifting story ends this way.

But rereading her diaries a few weeks ago, I was overcome with gratitude that during the last years of her life, and such a dark time in history, she had mornings where she woke up and felt “wonderfully peaceful.” Writing did that. So I don’t ever want to hear again that it doesn’t matter.