Post #141: Why I Write

15 Sep. 2024

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

—George Orwell, in his essay by the title I am borrowing

     I was astonished to discover, only a fortnight ago (see my passing reference in #136), that without my realizing it, I had written a good million words for publication over the past decade. (Nearly 300,000 here in less than a year and a half, which should be evidence enough for the plausibility of my claim even if you may have trouble locating the full range of my output.)

     Before I am accused of boasting, let me say that it looked quite the opposite to me at the time. What I said to a friend, when the full extent of “the whole catastrophe” dawned on me, was that in a world where others attract millions of “followers” (how true a coinage, for once!) with the most inane activities, or even billions with the most deplorable pseudo-artistic trash, it seemed to be my fate not to win a few thousand admirers for every word I write, as others do, but the inverse—having to write several thousands of words for every handful of readers I might attract!

     And why should it be otherwise? Why indeed. I accept my share in the lot of Sisyphus (#47, #75, and especially #102), but I also reserve the right to grumble or groan about it as much as I like. In the meantime, I do remind myself, day in day out, that every single reader matters, and that quality trumps quantity at every level. All this I really do believe with every fiber of my quill; but moving mountains so that I might end up with a molehill is no more my favorite activity than anyone else’s. And so, as per the right I reserve above, I will occasionally ask myself, or my friends (as in this case), just why I am bothering to go on despite everything.

     “That’s easy,” my friend answered a little too quickly: “because you love it!” She was not entirely wrong, of course, but also not quite right. Writing is not, in fact, something I would consider a pastime or hobby of mine, nor a passion strictly speaking. (We can talk passion too, one day, but that happens off the page for me.) I do enjoy writing, so I don’t quite agree with the chorus of writers lamenting their “horrible” agonies, but it’s certainly not so delightful to me that I would write a million words for my own entertainment only! It’s work: meaningful and sometimes gratifying work, to be sure, but laborious and exhausting, just as Orwell says.

     Quite apart from the enjoyment that may (sometimes) be had from it, I write because I believe that we should, if we are to live up to our human potential, make at least some effort at thinking things through and figuring things out. Writing helps me do that—to give some account of why I am doing what I am doing, and to make the challenges of life more intelligible, if possible, both to myself and to others.

     Admittedly such a propensity to reflect can also lead to over-thinking and an excessive reliance on our so-called rational faculties to the detriment of emotions and intuitions that have an intelligence of their own. I am not persuaded, however, that the two need to come at each other’s expense in this way, and that they cannot be developed together—the wisdom of the mind along with the wisdom of the heart. Only when the two can be brought into a semblance of harmony do I feel any strong sense of truth at all. There are times, granted, when one may need to act on one against the urgings of the other, but those are unhappy times, in my experience.

     Not that writing (or thinking) can ever be expected to come out quite right, of course, even at the best of times. Every book is bound to be a failure, as Orwell sighs in his essay. Writing is about struggling with understanding, not achieving it—about attempting (essaying!) to impose a measure of order against the ultimately insurmountable resistance that the complexity of the world puts up against our intellectual efforts. Thus “banning the dragon of Chaos for a while,” as Golo Mann wrote in the tribute to Schiller that I have quoted repeatedly (see especially my note to #80, and #116 on the wider theme), on the understanding that the great swirling welter of the world can never really be tamed.

     As the Tao Te Ching forever reminds us, the real Tao cannot be spoken about (ch. 56); to try to put the world into words is not really to know it as it is, but to see it through the construction that one is putting upon it. Such constructions can be highly meaningful, and comparatively robust, or not; they can reach for the truth with more or less cogency, but they can never quite get there. This need not make writing arbitrary—a mere exercise in relativism, or frog-perspective—but it does mean that the struggle must continue until it ceases for good, not in triumph but in surrender.

     Writing, then, is not just a pleasurable or even a meaning-giving activity for me, but a way of being in the world, a way of life—and as such something that can come under pressure, even to the point of being threatened with extinction, as I believe it is. Hence the alarmist, sometimes shrill tone that creeps into my texts, especially when I have suffered through another bitter confrontation with what the younger set tend to be like these days. Unless you were born before 1980, this sense of impending doom will be hard, perhaps impossible to relate to; after all it is not your habitat that is being encroached upon on all sides. Anyone older may not be overly concerned—the less so the more deeply he has drunk from the new wells, not the deeper, more ancient and musty-tasting ones—but will probably have some idea, at least, what I am talking about.

     As I was horrified to discover on my recent trip to London, the very newspaper vendors that used to make the city a beacon on the hill of the printed word have given up the ghost; physically, they continue to inhabit the old locations, but the spirit has departed, now that they sell only smokes, chewing gum, sticky fluids in aluminum cans, and other such true essentials of life. Who needs newspapers anymore in an age of 3-ply toilet paper?

     Even on the continent, where cafés used to be practically synonymous with newspaper racks (and chain-smoking, admittedly, see #138), the most venerable coffee houses have been degraded into backdrops for selfies and hubs for making one’s conference calls. Such is the erosion of standards that one is not even sure anymore whether to say anything when another barbarian starts yapping at full volume into his laptop, with noise-canceling earphones to protect his own acoustics, of course. The mind boggles.

     I don’t know how it looks these days in Paris. Perhaps here and there on the Rive Gauche pockets of resistance remain where the spirit of Gallic recalcitrance still prevails and a hardy bunch of Armorican villagers continue to fight off the mighty legions of the day. Even if it were so, my hopes for the preservation of some traces of European civilization would not rest very easily on French shoulders,* now that not only London, but Berlin and Vienna too, have surrendered what was once such a defining feature of their cityscapes. If Café Einstein in Berlin can give up its beautiful Stammhaus and take down the wooden sticks for hanging the day’s papers from the walls even Unter den Linden, then nothing is safe or sacred anymore—never mind that some of the most august institutions (the Central in Vienna for one) are so overrun by phone-toting tourists that the only real Viennese to be found there is Peter Altenberg in papier-mâché.

     Books still get read at cafés occasionally, you may say, even if most of them are listened to on the commute to work these days. Indeed, but what looks promising at first sight usually turns out a disappointment up close (see #119). To be sure, the pretense of being a reader still carries enough cachet to be upheld with much protestation; but the latest exercise in warming over the tired old secrets and magical manifestations does not a serious reader make, nor the perennial volumes about getting rich, or getting ahead, or getting laid, nor biographies about the successful, nor crime novels with gaudy covers.

     All this, for serious readers contemplating their prospects, is not a mere nuisance or inconvenience, it is an immediate and urgent threat to their survival, the anguished cry of an acutely endangered species. Alas, whereas every ungainly toad whose numbers may be dwindling in some dank corner of the forest is cause for millennial hysteria, the impending death of the printed word and those who have devoted their lives to it seems to be no particular cause for unease. In this melancholy slide towards irrelevance, the accumulating years alone are not even the biggest problem. It may all make me feel old, but the more pressing worry is that I feel all-too young at the same time, since the actuaries give me close to another half-century on this planet and the prospect of having to spend several more decades in this world, and worse to come, scares me rather more than the long shadow cast by my own prospective demise.

     It’s not, as I think I’ve made clear enough on several occasions (especially #136) that I expect any major apocalyptic turns of the evident physical kind that one hears so much about. I think the odds are good, on the contrary, that by most measurable standards, things will keep improving, perhaps dramatically. Such material yardsticks matter, but they do not take into adequate account the losses of those who are wedded to old ways of doing things, or those nuances in one’s quality of life that are impossible to quantify even in principle.

     I would not, then, predict that the world is going to be a less desirable place for most future human beings to live in, given what they are likely to ask of life; but that is saying very little about my purposes and prospects, which are dimmed not so much by visions of mass calamities as by dreadful apprehensions about precisely those things that seem to delight others especially. Ayn Rand said and wrote many ridiculous things, but one of her pronouncements that I remembered reading and agreeing with is that human beings cast in their usual tragic and suffering roles are relatively easy to sympathize with; it’s when one is confronted with their preferred enjoyments that they become insufferable. I don’t fear a miserable mankind; I fear a mankind delighted with its own mental poverty.

     Not that all ageing votaries of the old order will perish tomorrow—but that much is not required to doom their world. They do not need to disappear altogether; they only need to cease mattering. (My young friend at the end of the last post may see his wish come true sooner than he thinks.) Thus far, the intellectual center stage is still occupied—arguably more than ever—by a respectable number of certified heavyweights who are having plenty of extremely sophisticated and easily accessible conversations with each other online. In that respect, our mental ambitions may even, for the time being, look loftier than ever. But one might note, with unease, that the more credible characters in this impressive contemporary production are products of the old print-culture through and through, and therefore not to be used as evidence that all is, or will be, well.

     Perhaps no one exemplifies this dynamic more vividly than Jordan Peterson. If ever someone became who he is through the printed word, voraciously ingested, it is Peterson. He did just what I say I do too (and that is as far as I intend to take the comparison): he compiled his magnum opus over more than a decade of the most assiduous study and reading, driven by an imperative need to understand the horrible political aberrations, crimes, and confrontations of the twentieth century—and in the process he constructed an entire intellectual architecture on which his thinking remains based, with new annexes added, to this day. The key, however, to understanding Peterson the phenomenon of the past decade, is not how he comes across on the printed page, but how he comes alive on the stage, before a camera or a microphone. He’s a decent writer, though not an outstanding one; but as a speaker, a debater, an onscreen voice and personage, with his lightning-speed repartees and ever-ready answers (damn good answers too, almost all of the time), he is sensational—and there’s the crux of the matter.

     The brilliance of Peterson’s performances (as against his writing) does not diminish his stature in my eyes, the way it apparently does with other academics who refuse to give him the credit that I think he fully deserves. I for one stand in awe of what has become of a formerly obscure psychology professor at the University of Toronto. I do not presume to praise or censure the man, let alone to make myself the judge over his many merits; what I am interested in is the salient fact that he is so very much a child of the book, while at the same time, he has been such a formidable force behind turning our culture of learning in a radically different direction (even if he could be said to ride the storm more than to be conjuring it up). Nobody who listens to him raptly and perhaps benefits greatly (I am not denying it) will thereby learn to be as his hero is, because Peterson was himself formed so overwhelmingly by reading books, not by anything like his own high-octane acts on the wire, admire them as sincerely as one may (#116).

     Whatever good he and our other YouTube titans may be doing the world, the one thing they will not, cannot accomplish (except perhaps very occasionally) is to make readers of their audiences. To be sure, already confirmed book-lovers may get inspired to look up sources that get mentioned, and perhaps even read them one day, if they can tear themselves loose from their phones long enough; but the inclination to read and the habits and discipline it both requires and foster is not going to come from watching someone who owes his high visibility to how ably he has been negotiating a completely different medium—remaining a reader at heart himself, no doubt, but before a massive worldwide crowd of viewers and listeners.**

     To illustrate the trouble with even the most brilliant two-hour conversation, of which there are now so many online, arguably to our great distinction as an age—just try to find a particular segment again, as you can easily locate a favorite passage in a book that you have marked up, to return to and converse with again whenever you wish. It may be technically possible with podcasts, but it will not happen often, and certainly not as a matter of course, the way it does with serious readers of the kind that is dying off and not getting replaced. As with so much else in our day, it all goes in one ear and out the other. The same can happen with a book of course, but not if it is carefully worked-through, the way serious reading is meant to be done.

     Back from the big stage to my tiny one. I have no other world to dream of, no other life to look forward to. So it will have to be one day, one word, one text at a time for me.  The end should prove welcoming, I hope (as I spelled out in my last post, #140), but I do not believe in early exits, except given truly intolerable circumstances, which are not on the horizon, not yet at least. We are all expected to make the best of this life, not to throw it away. As for tomorrow, or the day after, who knows? The future is not visible to me (#136), only the present, and even that, in colors rather different from how we commonly perceive it to be. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

*A penchant for the resisting mode, or making a noisy show if it at least, should not be confused with having the means of preserving cherished things, as it so often has been in modern France—along with the illusion that toppling a government, or a regime, is as good as putting a better one in its place. I suppose it defines us that inasmuch as we can learn from history at all, we usually do so by repeating the same lessons over and over again.

**I cannot imagine many youthful Peterson-admirers thinking to themselves, when they see him in action, “I wish I could be as well-read as he!” Nine times out of ten, or ninety-nine out of a hundred, what I imagine them saying to themselves is, “If only I could be as impressive on screen, as successful, and as rich.” With his younger interviewers, sometimes clever but always lacking in his learning and reading, the conversations are not so much a meeting of minds as Socrates at the Symposium enlightening Bozo the High-Performer. Peterson seems quite happy to play the prophet to this lot, but their equal he is not, by a long stretch: it’s the World Series beside Little Leaguers—the latter earnest, polite, and well-intentioned, meticulously scrubbed and brushed, toned and ripped, endearing even (to a point), but fundamentally unable to keep up with a game that the other has perfected. Not prone to false modesties (or any other), they think they can do better on the strength of their optimizing regimens and algorithms. We’ll see about that when the old curtains close for real. I am not looking forward to it.

PS: The Muse of Writing is a touchy goddess. I would imagine that all of us who write seriously have gone through periods, perhaps for years at a time, when she would not speak to us, or only in the most confidential whispers unsuited for being made public. So when she bestows her graces on us and gives us something to say, it is not for us to question her ways or to call a halt willfully, or she might not favor us again. That’s why I write, ultimately, because if I do not put my trust in the goddess, as a writer, then where else?

     How good is any of it it? Hard to say: good enough not to stop myself. How much of a difference is it making to anyone? Not a lot, by the looks of it; no more than a faucet dripping into a tub. It’s not enough to take a bath, and maybe never will be; that would discourage me and maybe shut me up if I did not feel that I was doing the Muse’s bidding, and the Dhamma’s too, in my small way. And where will it lead? Who knows? So long as the direction is right, don’t ask, keep walking and find out (#16)!

PPS: On any kind of utilitarian calculus, the vast disproportion between the effort invested and the returns on this blog, or on my writing in general, would make me shut it all down. By the spreadsheet, it is not even remotely profitable, but a chronic loss-making operation. The reader will notice, however, that my texts are, in part, a protest against judging value in this manner.

     I am not averse to economics, I even teach it—with classical sympathies and few aversions in any direction save the Marxist (which I do not consider economics proper). It’s just that the utilitarians of yesteryear, and our own performance-minded set, have it wrong when they think that true value can be captured by their calculations alone, or that what does not show up in their numbers doesn’t matter. There are other dimensions that they are missing, higher ones, where meaning and redemption can be found against all odds and contrary to all appearances. These realms are not easily made plausible to those who don’t believe in them; even the faith of those who do will waver and be shaken along the way.

   My blog looks to me like a living demonstration of that faith in all its stronger and weaker moments. The thought of abandoning the effort has often occurred to me since the initial excitement wore off and it became clear that this would be, and in all likelihood would remain, yet another loss-making venture by the ledger. I enjoy a profit as much as anyone (more, perhaps, given that I expect it less)—but not at the price of watering down the best wine I am able make, or getting preoccupied with the label and the latest bottle-shape, or accommodating to prevailing low tastes the precious elixirs inside—gifts of grace and fortune (#109), not an ego-project, whatever anyone may say.

   I teach economics (not business)—the dismal discipline of being clear-minded about the costs of what one is doing (as against the pursuit of profits). I am fully aware of running at a loss, and quite clear on the concept of opportunity cost and its ramifications; there is nothing in economics as I understand it that would force me to shut my venture down so long as I consider the burden worth bearing because it has compensations of another kind, and meaning even in defeat.

     That all said, operating under a continuous loss, with nothing tangible to point to (or not much), whatever may be going on at higher levels, cannot be a motivator for us as worldly creatures, but only a drag on our energies. It puts a venture under suspicion—no more than that, but also no less—of wasting time, effort, and resources on a project that is simply not valued enough to justify the expense. Whatever such losses one may be willing to sustain, we all have a limit. I have no idea where mine might be. I make no promises to keep going, but I also won’t rule it out.