I feel like I’ve lost the power of speech. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but that’s what it feels like. I don’t write...
I feel like I’ve lost the power of speech.
I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but that’s what it feels like.
I don’t write now. Well, I don’t write posts now. I write messages. And I rewrite them. I rewrite them three or four times. They’re still unfinished. They’re still wrong. They’re awkward. They’re unreadable. And I don’t have anything to say.
I wanted to write something great. I put it down in words. I wrote it out. It was unfinished. It was wrong. I handed it around. Two or three people read it. That’s what they told me. No, that wasn’t what they told me. Still, it wasn’t right. So I went back. I read more, but I didn’t read enough. I read more, but the reading took longer. I had so much to read. And I didn’t write at all.
It’s one thing to know that there’s something you don’t know. That’s healthy. That’s useful. It’s something else to have nothing to say.
Andrew Sullivan was one of the first bloggers. That’s what they say about him, at least. I don’t know how long he’s been blogging – I don’t know and I don’t care to find out – but when I first read him, he was blogging every day, every waking hour.
He broke down. He was writing too much. He was thinking too little. He shut down his blog. He went on a retreat. He stopped writing. He stopped speaking. He started thinking. Then he came back. And what did he do then? He started writing again. He started blogging again, with New York Magazine. Just not quite so often.
There are others like him. Tyler Cowen, Mickey Kaus, Steve Sailer. They wrote with a monomania. They had a handful of ideas and a handful of stories. And they repeated them. I don’t know what that does to you. I do know that it’s been ages since Tyler Cowen wrote a book worth reading.
Cowen reads so much and writes so little. He writes short sketches, sometimes. He has lists. Sometimes he takes the sketches and lists and makes a book, filling out the spaces in-between with facts, nothing but facts. He takes a fact, writes it down, and pastes a footnote at the end. Done. Next. It reads like something patched-together. It’s awkward. It doesn’t work.
He doesn’t work hard enough.
They’re sharing a Vanity Fair profile of Leon Wieseltier, one-time editor of The New Republic’s review section, long-time sexual predator. Apparently, the man was something of a fraud.
“He was fluent and learned in almost everything one talked about,” recalls [Marty] Peretz, who compares Wieseltier to the great Jewish philosopher Spinoza. “He’s pretty unusual in that he’s extremely cerebral and extremely what we used to call ‘hip.’ … He has given a gravitas to the literary section.”
Wieseltier came to this perch of high culture highly recommended by his doting intellectual mentors: critic Lionel Trilling at Columbia, philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin at Oxford (where he went up to Balliol College on a prestigious Columbia College Kellett Fellowship), and historian Yosef Yerushalmi at Harvard (where he won a plum appointment to the Society of Fellows). He was, they all agreed, a brilliant young man of breathtaking promise who would one day bring forth works of enduring importance.
“If he will produce a book, it’ll be a triumph, and I very much hope he does,” says Sir Isaiah, to whom Wieseltier announced himself following a letter of introduction from Trilling. Sir Isaiah isn’t the only one waiting for the magnum opus—which Wieseltier describes as a physiological/historical/philosophical critique of sighing, with a few chapters partially written after four years’ labor.
But among Wieseltier’s friends there is much speculation about the true state of his book. For despite his vertiginous I.Q. and prodigious learning, Wieseltier seems to have worked as hard at the construction and maintenance of his glittering image as he has at the occupation of thinking and writing. As he once told a pal, “You must always have a cover. You always have to have something you can tell people you’re doing, something really nifty.” Wieseltier’s friend pointedly adds, “When in fact what you’re doing is eating peanuts in bed.”
“It’s an attack on sighing is what it is,” Wieseltier explains, “because to sigh is, sort of, you go up, up, up, and instead of going the whole way you very cozily shrink back. It’s something between complacence and resignation… . I’m not going to tell you a lot about it, but there’s stuff about breathing… .” (“Oh dear,” Sir Isaiah sighs. “I don’t understand it, and neither do you.”)
“The thing is this: he began working at Oxford and he never finished,” Sir Isaiah laments. “And then he went to Harvard, was in the Society of Fellows, and did he get his doctorate? No? I thought not. Academically, he’s not a finisher.”
There’s something to be said for not becoming the sort of person who eats peanuts in bed.
And after sharing the Vanity Fair piece, someone else shared a bit of Mike Munger’s advice. Munger had “seen a lot of very talented people fail because they couldn’t, or didn’t, write.”
Everyone’s unwritten work is brilliant. And the more unwritten it is, the more brilliant it is. We have all met those glib, intimidating graduate students or faculty members. They are at their most dangerous holding a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, in some bar or at an office party. They have all the answers. They can tell you just what they will write about, and how great it will be.
Years pass, and they still have the same pat, 200-word answer to “What are you working on?” It never changes, because they are not actually working on anything, except that one little act.
You, on the other hand, actually are working on something, and it keeps evolving. You don’t like the section you just finished, and you are not sure what will happen next. When someone asks, “What are you working on?,” you stumble, because it is hard to explain. The smug guy with the beer and the cigarette? He’s a poseur and never actually writes anything. So he can practice his pat little answer endlessly, through hundreds of beers and thousands of cigarettes. Don’t be fooled: You are the winner here. When you are actually writing, and working as hard as you should be if you want to succeed, you will feel inadequate, stupid, and tired. If you don’t feel like that, then you aren’t working hard enough.
I don’t know how to put one word after another. I can’t make it come together. I can’t even do what Tyler Cowen does – I can’t put a fact, a footnote, and a period – I can’t sketch out something worth reading. I can’t write. I’m not writing.
I’m not working hard enough.
I feel so called out
I came out to eat peanuts in bed and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.
same