Monday. Early. The Writing Life opened on my lap.
This morning, three passages piqued my interest. Three in quick succession, like knocking on the same door from different directions.
The first:
“The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it. If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.”
I read it twice and put the book down.
Because this is the thing I keep forgetting. Spend any time on social media, and you start to feel the pressure: document the experience, aestheticise the ordinary, post the beautiful breakfast, the plane window, or the aspirational whatever. FOMO as content strategy is a drag. And if you follow the system, slowly, without noticing, you start writing toward the shot instead of toward the thought.
I like documenting. I do. A quick photo as a visual note. A tweet to catch a thought before it dissolves. But there’s a difference between noting and performing. Between capturing the moment and manufacturing one. Dillard’s point cuts cleanly: the hamburger doesn’t need reporting. We’ve all had the hamburger. What you read, what you learn — that’s what makes you different.
The second passage:
“In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.”
He thought of himself in a hat. I know that writer. I’ve probably been that writer. There’s something seductive about the identity of a writer (the associations, the image) that has nothing to do with actually loving words on a page.
Dillard’s claim is that the great ones (Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gauguin) were powered by love of the material. They found excitement in the variety of materials. The complexities of the field ignited their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks. The tasks suggested the schedules.
So what do I actually love?
Books, yes. But more specifically: the essay. Vidal at his most lethal. Hitchens when properly wound up. Tim Cahill disappearing into somewhere difficult and coming back with something funny and true. Robert Kaplan reading a landscape like an argument.
Philosophy that doesn’t require a security clearance. Lin Yutang. Christopher Ross. Robert Twigger. Wisdom you can use.
Journalism as a contact sport. Robert Anton Wilson dissolving your reality tunnel. Joan Didion making anxiety literary. Hunter Thompson turns chaos into method, while Chuck Klosterman treats pop culture with more seriousness than it deserves, ultimately proving it does deserve that seriousness. PJ O’Rourke being gleefully wrong in the most instructive way.
And blogging, but not the content-marketed, SEO-optimised, monetised kind. The guerrilla kind. The punk rock DIY kind. Someone with something to say in their small corner of the internet and the willingness to say it whether the algorithm rewards them or not. That spirit. That’s the one I’m in love with.
Third passage. A writer gets collared by a student asking if they could be a writer. The writer says, ‘Do you like sentences?’
My version of that question would be ‘Do you like hyperlinks?’
Not as a joke. To me, the hyperlink is the sentence of the digital medium. The structural unit that creates meaning in a non-linear environment. To care about hyperlinks is to understand that your text is a node, not an island. A well-placed link does something no explanatory prose can replicate. The pathways matter as much as the words.
Sentences and hyperlinks. That’s the material.
Then Dillard lists the lineages. Hemingway studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Singer also studied Hamsun and Turgenev. Ellison studied Hemingway and Stein. Thoreau loved Homer. Welty loved Chekhov.
Reading is apprenticeship. That’s what I got back this morning.
When I read, I’m not consuming. I’m studying in the lineage. When I blog, I’m practising in public, in the tradition of the essay, the journal, and the notebook.
Does anybody even blog anymore? Maybe not. But Homer is still going. Montaigne never stopped. The medium shifts. The practice doesn’t.
That’s why I read. That’s why I write.
Dillard reminded me. I’d forgotten, again. Now I remember, again.
Click on the plus then click the hyperlink to take a trip.