The figure at the window
Allows the light to come and go,
Describing with curtains a house’s share:
The common cause of tenderness,
The record of living that dissolves to mess,
The lazy courtesies all houses wear
To dress anxiety in homely weeds.
Such duplicity defines our needs:
What’s outside must be kept out there.
But graces gather about the portal
That makes an altar in the wall;
They fix an otherwordly stare
On the broken knowledge the world contains.
At rest, through a serenity of panes,
Our worship is holy and debonair,
A thoughtless caption at the windowsill
Blessing quietly a dwelling’s will,
The savage history of our simplest care:
A bed, a table, some love, a prayer.
“In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide—sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.”
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Madame de Staël, On Germany:
“Nothing is less applicable to the conduct of life than a mathematical reasoning: a proposition in figures is decidedly either false or true; in all other relations the true mixes itself with the false in such a manner that often instinct alone can make us decide between different motives which are sometimes equally powerful on either side.”
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Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant, User-Friendly:
“Call it the user-friendly paradox: As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing.”
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Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind: A Novel:
“His posture eased, his lips moved to the faintest of smiles, and someone pleasant appeared in his expression, the boy his mother must have once loved. I wondered what had softened him. . . . How unknowable men are, full of corners.”
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Edith Templeton, The Surprise of Cremona:
“He who does not take the time to conquer the artichoke by stages does not deserve to penetrate to its heart. There are no shortcuts in life to anything: least of all to the artichoke.”
A few weeks back, under The Next 1,000 rubric in Newsletter No. 28, I wrote about As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. The reader who’d added it to the ever-growing list of titles at the website was my wife, Margot, and her persuasive case for the book led me to conclude the squib in my email by saying, ”If we can find the book around the house, I’m reading this next.”
As it turns out, our original copy was nowhere to be found, having likely made its way into the tottering piles my mother maintains at her house. Fortunately, however, Margot, taking me at my word, had ordered a second copy as soon as she was finished proofreading the newsletter, which is why it was close at hand over the long President’s Day weekend, when I was under the weather but clearheaded enough to enjoy the therapeutic regimen assigned me: sit in bed and read.
I couldn’t have asked for better company in this circumstance than Child and DeVoto. The conversation that unfolds in the long letters between them, Julia writing from France (at the start, at least) and Avis from Cambridge, Mass, where her husband, Bernard, an acclaimed journalist and historian, was an instructor at Harvard, is sheer joy, spiced with culinary insight and gossip social, cultural, and political. As Margot pointed out, it’s suffused with the pleasure of friendship in formation and, ultimately, in full flower.
Assembled, edited, and nicely annotated by Joan Reardon, As Always, Julia was published in 2010 with the apt subtitle, “Food, Friendship and the Making of a Masterpiece.” The correspondence began in 1952, when Child sent Bernard DeVoto a paring knife from Paris. Child had never met DeVoto, but nonetheless was compelled to address his pining for a good carbon steel utensil after she’d read an installment of his Harper’s magazine column, “The Easy Chair,” in which he decried American stainless steel because it couldn’t hold a proper edge.
The thank you note that came to Child in Paris started like this:
Dear Mrs. Child: I hope you won’t mind hearing from me instead of from my husband. He is trying to clear the decks before leaving on a five weeks trip to the Coast and is swamped with work, though I assure you most appreciative of your delightful letter and the fine little knife. Everything I say you may take as coming straight from him—on the subject of cutlery we are in entire agreement.
She goes on for eight substantial paragraphs—two full, well-packed book pages—about the “cutlery question” and other coincidental matters:
An aside on eating—I am green with envy at your chance to study French cooking. There are two dishes served at Bossu on the Quai Bourbon that I remember in my dreams, and if by any chance you know how to make them I would be forever in your debt if you would let me know.
Julia, of course, takes up this challenge, responding with her recipes for scrambled eggs in the French style and veal with cream and tarragon. The women’s immediate bond, forged by a kitchen knife and fostered by common interests and intelligence, was soon anchored to a project—the masterpiece of Reardon’s subtitle—getting underway: the manuscript that would ultimately become one of the most important American cookbooks of all time, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which Child created in collaboration with two French women, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, but which might never have seen the light of day without the editorial attention and publishing midwifery of Avis DeVoto.
The conception, writing, styling, recipe testing, and various reconfigurings of Mastering the Art of French Cooking—to say nothing of its wayward journey to bookshop shelves, an obstacle course through various hurdles and assorted publishers—provides an intriguing narrative framework to the first, large portion of the correspondence. It’s fascinating in itself and doubly so refracted through the wit and worry of two wise women whose respect and affection for one another was marvelous for this reader to share. I felt like I was making new friends, too.
The slow passage of time across the lengthy letters, the connection forged in sentences and sentiments without a face-to-face meeting for a few years, is epitomized in the real desire each woman expresses for photographs of the other, a circumstance—a kind of suspension of discovery, a tantalizing anticipation that goes beyond the images themselves—that is hard for us to comprehend in our world of infinite pictures and instant communication.
“Now that I know Paul [Child’s husband] is a photographer,” writes Avis in February 1953, nearly a year after their first exchange, “I have a definite request to make. . . . I want Paul to take a photograph of you at the kitchen stove. With or without decorated fish.”
“Yes,” comes Julia’s response, “we’ll send you some photos, but only on the severe condition that you will send us several of the two of you and the two boys. We visualize you as about 5 and ½ feet (you said once that you weighed 112 when your weight dropped, so imagine you would normally be about 125). With dark hair (I don’t know why) . . .”
Three weeks later, Julia again: “And the photographs arrived in the same mail. At last we know! I love the looks of DeVoto, there is a wonderful gaiety and intensity about that face. Now, how do I know whether you look as I pictured you, now that I’ve seen you. You are dark, anyway. That is a wonderfully worldly expression you have on in the group picture, really superb . . . It is the face I always try to wear when I am in New York, with no success.”
And Avis, shortly afterward: “Pictures just arrived. Hooray! I am enchanted with them, and think I will have the big one of you at Cordon Bleu and the extremely handsome one of Paul framed for my Hall of Fame. . . . I am very, very pleased with your looks, so warm and vigorous and handsome. . . . I am rather astonished that you are such a big girl. Six feet, whoops.”
The excitement about the photographs, the palpable thrill that pulses through these letters as they fashion a long-distance friendship, the enthusiastic immersion in kitchen lore and technique, the energy of the women’s effort at transatlantic translation of local customs—all speak of an art of conjuring that is cheering to discover in these letters, despite that fact that such resourcefulness moves further out of our twenty-first-century reach with every attention-atrophying wonder of our tap-activated, clickable world.
Sunrise, sunset, and J. M. W. Turner’s book of hours.
J. M. W. Turner, Norham Castle, Sunrise
That voice, at the start, could have stopped with the light, left heaven and earth glad in its glow. But so lithe was light’s beauty, so playful its touch, that the voice quickly conjured the rest of creation, indulging light’s longing for things to caress.
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The years we make, through breath and memory, but what we are given is the day. And, as the minister who narrates Marilynne Robinson’s luminescent novel Gilead sees, our days are not as various as the years make them appear: “. . . it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning.”
The medieval monastics who created the Divine Office celebrated this gift, dividing the day into the canonical hours, defining each hour by prayer. Through their devotions, it was light that led them, and not time. Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers, Compline—each hour encompassed a band of light, mirroring the perceptible changes of the day’s illumination. In the silence of a cloister, the noise of time was quiet too, its metaphorical ticking washed in the chants that, from Matins through Compline, praised the light and marked our turning in it.
Those thoughts, culled from an essay I wrote some years ago, returned to me after viewing, at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a majestic exhibition of the art of J. M. W. Turner, in which more than four score paintings from Tate Britain were on display, catching light in all its glory.
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“The sun is god” said the artist in his last days, at least as reported by John Ruskin, who may have been mythologizing, but with characteristic imaginative precision. Whatever Turner’s faith, his work reverenced the lingering constancy of creation, illuminated in the hours he sang in his work, from sunrise to sunset and back again.
Oscar Wilde defined public opinion as “an attempt to organize the ignorance of the community, and to elevate it to the dignity of physical force.” I took special note of that description when I came across it in Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures four years ago, figuring it might usefully be applied at some point to the unfolding presidential political debacle (it didn’t take a lot of prescience to imagine that, I admit). But I forgot about it until a few months later, when I came across Madame de Staël’s earlier and more nuanced conception of public opinion as a force that grows to fill the gap between the governed and the governing classes when a common promise loses its power to connect them. This idea was discussed by Robert Darnton in his review of Germaine de Staël: A Political Portrait, by Biancamaria Fontana, in the June 23, 2016 issue of the New York Review of Books. The persistent attachments of the people, Staël suggested in her contemporary rumination on the French Revolution, could become passionate weapons in a pervasive war against the existing political structures, whatever their denomination.
You can imagine why this train of thought from four years ago is barreling down the tracks toward me again, as we head toward what looks to be another electoral calamity. In his essay, Darnton smartly invokes the work of Walter Lippmann, who wrote more than a century after Staël:
When Walter Lippmann tried to characterize public opinion, he, like Staël, emphasized the tenuous link between the governed and the governors. Public affairs are enormously complex, he insisted. The public can know them only imperfectly, at a great distance, and through the haze of collective views, which he described as a “pseudo-environment.” Intermediaries, especially in the press, intervene in this environment by translating the decisions made by public figures into stories that the public can consume as news. But this process is more a matter of manipulating symbols than of diffusing ideas . . .
What Lippmann described as a “pseudo-environment” is now no longer solely the province of the press; thanks to the internet and social media—and, especially, the commercial constructions created by Facebook, Google, and others to exploit those technologies for their profit with a swashbuckling sociopathy—everyone can be an intermediary and, more to the point, determined forces can weaponize symbols and automate their delivery with pernicious precision and effect. The power of the media in translating events into “stories that the public can consume as news” has been compromised, at times corrupted through its own complicity, while new breeds of unmediated insurgents, like fast-mutating viruses, replicate with abandon to infect opinion with gleeful destructiveness. When the “pseudo-environment” comes to encompass all of “reality,” and the symbols begin to manipulate the intermediaries as well as the public, you get the pathology we’re browsing online, reading in the papers, or watching on television every hour these days. And who knows what’s in your neighbors’ newsfeeds.
Considering the continual turmoil that roiled France following the first flash of the Revolution, Darnton quotes Fontana, who is channeling the insight of her subject, the astonishing Madame de Staël: “No one . . . had the ‘capacity to fill the imaginative void left by the legacy of the old monarchy.’” A similar imaginative void engendered the gap between electorate and elected that surprising political forces rushed through in 2016, a gap that only seems to have grown in the past four years to include the reckless manipulation of more than symbols: the long-standing logistics of justice, national interest, and market economics are being both disrupted and corrupted before our eyes. It’s the void created when, like the old monarchy, institutions—legal, political, civic, economic, educational, religious, even scientific—that might steady our course in a climate of intensities lose their moorings but continue to operate as if they haven’t, abdicating their responsibilities under the influence of the glitter of greed, the allure of celebrity culture, the hysteria of the 24-hour news cycle, the stupor of doctrinal absolutes, and the terrorism of technology-fueled disinformation. Longing for an older America may be a fantasy, but it is fueled by a lost promise so clear and present to the fantasists—and so disconnected from the no less wishful narratives of self-anointed reasonable players—that, without the ballast of institutional convictions, our collective phantasms threaten to hold us in their grip for some time to come.
I fell in love with Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) the first time I met her. We were introduced by Richard Holmes, biographer of Shelley and Coleridge and author as well of two of the most marvelous books I know: Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer and The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. I would read Mr. Holmes on any subject, so I was glad to discover his essay on Staël, originally published in the New York Review of Books in 2009 and since revised and collected in his volume This Long Pursuit, of whom I had little previous knowledge.
Holmes begins:
She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel—Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as “vulgaire.” She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart, / ‘Tis woman’s whole existence.” And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered.
Makes you want to read more about her, right? And you should. You’ll be astonished that a woman of such prominence and power in a tumultuous era is largely forgotten today, or remembered only for Corinne (which, in addition to being an excellent novel is also a pioneering scout in the literary territory of the higher travel writing; I included it in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die). But, while neglected today, her ambitious works of political and cultural analysis (On Germany, for example, and The Influence of the Passions Upon the Happiness of Individuals and Nations) have proven to be trenchant and prophetic. The extent of her influence in her own time is astonishing. “At the height of de Staël’s fame in 1814,” Holmes writes, “the French memoir writer Madame de Chastenay summed up her life in a single epigram. There were, she wrote, three great powers struggling against Napoleon for the soul of Europe: ‘England, Russia, and Madame de Staël.’”
Tolstoy introduced her into the pages of War and Peace (indeed, much of his thinking about the cumulative influence of individual human wills upon history, most clearly articulated in the meditative chapter following his description of the devastating battle of Borodino, seems like an elaboration of Staël’s ideas on public opinion). Often quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson, she has also been name-checked by Meadow Soprano (season 2, episode 7, Wikipedia reports). So, in addition to extensive travels in her own time, both literal and figurative, she’s also gotten around a bit in ours. But not enough: she deserves to be more widely remembered, and invoked, as I hope to do again in this space as our relationship continues to develop.
Holmes again, rightly:
. . . she was a truly extraordinary woman who courageously created a new role in society, one even larger than that of her irrepressible heroine Corinne. This role was that of the independent, freelance, female intellectual in Europe.
“I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs.”
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Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking:
“. . . the mind is also a landscape of sorts and . . . walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.”
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Louise Nevelson:
“There is in every human being a desire for order. But the artist doesn’t have it ready-made. That is the search.”
“Creation basically is that you are searching for a more aware order.”
“Art is as alive as our breathing, as our own lives, but it’s more ordered.”
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Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era:
“Men engaged on research commonly suppose they are doing it because it is there to be done, like housecleaning; but the intuitions that drive them have frequently been divined by poets, the ventriloquists of social need.”
“For language creates characteristic force fields. A whole quality of apprehension inheres in its sounds and its little idioms.”
“Whoever can give his people better stories than the ones they live in is like the priest in whose hands common bread and wine become capable of feeding the very soul, and he may think of forging in some invisible smithy the uncreated conscience of his race.”
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Rob Rieman, Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal:
“To remain faithful to values is precisely why individuals must be open to change in forms.”
Untitled, c. 1985, Louise Nevelson, New Britain Museum of American Art
I spent an hour Sunday morning, while the house was quiet, turning the pages of—paying my respects to is probably a better description—a book that looks something looks more like a totem that a volume. Large and nearly square (it’s roughly 12×13 inches), it’s bound in deep black cloth and bears a raised circular emblem of geometric evocation on its cover, where the title is embossed in confident gold: Nevelson’s World.
This bound celebration of the art of the sculptor Louise Nevelson, who died in 1988 at the age of 89, has a place of honor in my home library, on the low shelf for oversized volumes that is directly behind my desk, and where its joined by other books I value inordinately for the inspiration with which they’ve nourished my attention. I set it there when the bookcases were built, more than two decades ago, as an emblem of the artistic, even spiritual, energy it conveys—hoping, I suppose, that Nevelson’s creative example might work some magic through proximity to my writing desk—and it has sat there undisturbed, except for its handling in a fit of dusting several years ago, ever since. Such is the way of the world, to say nothing of the errant habits of once-purposeful appetites.
Until last night, that is, when I discovered it once again, and was once again enthralled. It felt as if I were attending a grand reopening, for the book—authored by Jean Lipman and published, in 1983, by Hudson Hills Press in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art. is one of the most physically stunning I own; its dimensions and weight, the heft of its paper and the elegance of its typography and page layouts, the sumptuousness and care of its capture of the chromatic tones of Nevelson’s wood constructions in black, white, and gold, combine to lure and then embellish one’s alertness the way an historic public space can sharpen our senses with the scents of destiny and endeavor.
The prompt that led me back to the book was our visit, Saturday afternoon, to the New Britain Museum of American Art in central Connecticut. There, turning a corner out of a room devoted to the sweeping murals of Thomas Hart Benton’s The Arts of Life in America, and a little tipsy from the potent fumes of their invention, I was startled to discover, on a wall in that belonged more to a hallway than gallery, an epitome of Nevelson’s singularity, unassumingly titled Untitled, c. 1985. About three-and-a-half feet wide and two feet tall, with a depth of around inches, it is a box-like structure of found wooden objects—empty thread spools, a clothespin, an isolated link of tongue-and-grove carpentry—painted black, its shapes and shadows transformed into an cohesive entity that exudes the confidences of an altar.
As I pondered Nevelson’s World the morning after, the artist’s voice quoted within it spoke not only to the images arranged on the large pages, but to the memory of the work I’d viewed in New Britain, allowing me to turn over in my mind the perceptions the sculpture, small by Nevelson’s scale, had conjured:
“Anywhere I found wood, I took it home and started working with it. . . . I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.”
“The shadow, you know, is as important as the object. . . . I arrest it and I give it architecture as solid as anything can be.”
“There is in every human being a desire for order. But the artist doesn’t have it ready-made. That is the search.”
Nevelson’s constructions make that search palpable—shares it—with an adamantine ingenuity. Looking at that box on a wall in the New Britain museum, I watched a cabinet of wonders in cross-section, a drawer slid out from the artist’s mind in which antiques are kept and antiquity evoked through uncanny arrangement.
“The most beautiful order of the world,” Heraclitus wrote, “is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”
“Creation basically,” Louise Nevelson said 2,500 years later, “is that you are searching for a more aware order.”
I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I walk to most of my ideas, and walking, I’d wager, is the most ingenious instrument in a writer’s toolbox. As Rebecca Solnit puts it in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, “the mind is also a landscape of sorts and . . . walking is one way to traverse it. A new thought often seems like a feature of the landscape that was there all along, as though thinking were traveling rather than making.”
Solnit’s history of “the most obvious and the most obscure thing in the world” leads her in the footsteps of poets and pilgrims, artists and activists, farmers and philosophers, as she follows walking’s fertile path into “religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.” Historical and literary, personal and imaginative, her curious testament is a prolonged, provocative ode to a mode of action in which mind and body, time and space engage each other in easy conversation; it’s a stimulating and surprising cultural exercise.
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The distances traversed on foot by the English Romantics—the most famous of serious walkers perhaps was Wordsworth—is astonishing. In Wordsworth’s case (from his residence at Racedown, at least), it was seven miles to the post office, and a walk of equal length just to look someone up was not uncommon. (What kind of shoes did Wordsworth wear, one can’t help but wonder, as he strode intently over hill and plain?) If we walk half as far as Wordsworth, there’s world enough—just enough—for time to find a focus that fits our frame of reference, to lose its awful, abstract face and concentrate its attention on the rhythm of our wandering: time becomes intimate and personable, the present falls—precisely—into place.
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Time slows down when one walks; the getting from here to there, the long hours we spend in between activities, come to life as they do not when we whiz from point to point in our daily itineraries driven by cars, trains, planes. Slow as she goes, the walker is in touch with the time she travels through, and her perceptions, as a result, emanate more directly from her own senses. When we walk, the world is always close at hand; each step provides a context for the next, each sensation assumes a place in a progress of perceptions. The two lessons of experience—the first is life is short; the second, life is long (or vice versa)—meet for a moment on a hillside so far beyond anticipation and regret that we can almost lose sight of them entirely, and reap “the harvest of a quiet eye.”
On writing—and on writing about writing that’s a joy to read.
I spend an inordinate amount of my waking life turning sentences around. Come to think of it, it’s not just my waking hours: I often fall out of slumber in the middle of the night to find a phrase tickling my mind. In such states of groggy consciousness, I know, on the one hand, that I won’t be able to retrieve in the morning the words I’ve just woken to if I don’t capture them before I drop back to sleep; and, on the other hand, that those phrases aligning themselves unbidden in the wee small hours often unravel knots of expression I’d fumbled with for hours at my desk—which means the one hand meets the other in the dark to grab the pad and pencil that are always on my bedside table.
In plainer words, the shaping of sentences shapes my attention most midnights, noons, and mornings, even when I am not, strictly speaking, attending to them. As a consequence, my perspective on books about writing is a blend of interest and skepticism, the former sometimes avid and the latter generally severe. Most books about the subject, I’ve found, are not about writing itself but about hacking composition for the purposes of clarity or protocol, like cramming to do well on a test with no concern for acquiring knowledge.* But to be under the spell of sentences in a way that—by habit or necessity, perversity or inspiration—describes one’s purchase on the world is to write with a different purpose, to see writing not as a vehicle for conveying what we have decided to say but as a road along which we make our way to meaning. The path is exploratory rather than direct, ruminative rather efficient, pondering (and, alas, sometimes ponderous). “Truth happens to an idea,” William James asserted; in the same way, meaning happens to sentences.**
“And should you always be clear about what you are going to say before you say it?” asks Joe Moran in First You Write a Sentence, the best book on writing I’ve ever read:
More useful might be the way of classical rhetoric: learn how a good sentence sounds and mimic it. Instead of draining some finite pool of sense, write in a way that engenders sense out of nothing. That is how Shakespeare learned to write at grammar school—rote learning the art of verbal ornament, getting to know words as sounds and shapes before they calcified into meaning.
Alertness to the weight and tone of words (what I like to call, in my scientific ignorance, their specific gravity), and to the way this presence resounds through the past and future of a sentence with the melody of thinking, is one of the most salient lessons of Moran’s teaching, which, we learn by anecdote as well as advice, he has clearly internalized: “I haunt the corridors of my university building, speaking sentences under my breath.”
If Moran is especially good on the primacy of sound in both composition and expression—“Train your ears,” he tells us in the third of the “Twenty Sentences on Sentences” that close the book, “for how a sentence sounds in the head is also what it says to the heart”—he offers valuable perspective, and applied intelligence, on everything he views through his pedagogical lens: the use of adjectives and punctuation, abstraction and its discontents, the streaky windowpane of the plain style and the high-wire act of the long sentence. Pleasure of reading is the book’s first virtue: Moran writes with élan, his chapters carrying their cargo of advice with a wit that leavens its weight. He has a Geiger counter for apt quotation and the field it sweeps is wide, his range of reference extending from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton to the contemporary memoirist Maggie Nelson; from William Tyndale, whose early English translations of the Bible infused our language with a grace and will it still wears, to Virginia Woolf, who refreshed and elaborated both; from Ernest Fenollosa, student of the Chinese ideogram, to Frank Sinatra, who, Moran aptly notes, sang in sentences.
Studded with examples from industry, advertising, science, technology, and history as well as linguistics and literature, First You Write a Sentence employs a fox’s method in the service of a hedgehog’s focus. Underneath it all runs a modest but eloquent apologia for a life spent assaying the substance and spirit of words on a page (Moran’s first chapter is called “A Pedant’s Apology”). By the author’s estimate, I suppose I belong to “the last generation in a long era—let’s call it the printocene—when writing was meant to be read much later than it was written.” While more people are “writing” now than ever before—“All over the world people are writing,” Moran observes, “tapping out e-mails or texting friends with that familiar, two-thumb dance”—their efforts mimic speech rather than rhetoric, prizing messages in the moment rather than reflections beyond the reach of the day’s ticking demands.
We’ve been warned a lot in the past decade about the end of reading, but maybe it’s the end of writing that is more imminent, as the world—“Hello, Alexa,” “Hey, Google”—becomes all ears. To speak one’s thoughts eliminates the friction of having to compose them in the service of expression, to wrangle words, rhythms, and time into some semblance of meaning; it eliminates as well the friction of parsing on the reader’s part, of riding waves of clauses into seas of knowledge, of puzzling through unknown territories of discovery, danger, difference, longing. A life too user-friendly, powered by a cloud that’s all-knowing, may end up leaving us little to live for, much less write about.
What is the end of all this writing, anyway? What’s the point of that notebook on the nightstand? Moran proves helpful here as well, invoking what the Japanese call shokunin katagi, which is “about much more than skill”:
It bears the social obligation to make something for the joy of making it, quietly and beautifully. It invests the simplest daily acts with artistry, whether it be making tea, raking Shirakawa gravel in a garden or curating that work of art and lunch that is a bento box. The point of life is to infuse the quotidian with the pleasure of creation and the pursuit of perfection. The art of sentence craft seems ideally suited to this artisanal spirit.
And so I type this Reader’s Diary on the morning of January 31, 2020.
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NOTES: *For a stimulating reflection on how the hackability of tests derails learning, with corollary larger lessons, see Paul Graham’s The Lesson to Unlearn, which I highly recommend.
**“Political groups have almost no sense of irony,” Richard Rodriguez once told an interviewer asking about his critics. “For them, language has to say exactly what it means.” Which, the author of Hunger of Memory didn’t but might have added, is like expecting life to tell us exactly what it means, when we, alone, can give that words.
