Le Pen
this writing almost didn't happen
It never ceases to amaze me how fast my desires change, and how quickly I am at once ready to change the world, and then—just as quickly as the idea was put into me from the beauty of nature, or from some random chance of good fortune—I shrink from any powerful ambition and relegate myself to a corner of my room (in the prone position), wishing I had never felt at all.
How long it takes to even arrive at a single sentence or idea, just as the one said above. How does this happen? From where did the mind hit upon this amazing faculty, so great and necessary for communication, for feeling made purposeful, for all people to come together in the written word? O, glory to ideas, to their power, to their life-giving properties.
So many noises and distractions from the world destroy what is possible for us to see, to feel, to be. We all make greater sacrifices than we realize. No man can ever become transparent to himself, let alone to another, but there is a moment—in any reading experience, or encounter in nature—where it is possible for a sympathy to be found in which we are transcended, made apparent, and from which we understand what it is to understand.
Man, the most confused of all creatures, thrives off this idea—to be apparent in the eyes of others and themselves. The time of man’s life is not enough to fully know what there is to love in the world. So, it happens that he goes blindly into life, half drunk, and stumbles his way into what he loves, and is at once met with what he may or may not find appropriate to him. Let life be as such.
There is no greater thing than the unknown, at least for a writer. Always is this unknown scary, terrifying, dreadful, etc. Not unlike attempting to put to paper what you think, the unknown of life returns us to our earliest periods of consciousness—when we were but crazed animals eking out whatever existence there was to make, given sticks, stones, and the great plains before us, with all those predators and prey with similar thoughts in mind. Entire worlds are dangled before us, toying with us.
The gap between the first idea and the next is incomparable. There is nothing even close to the gap, and nearly nothing bridges the distance.
One must always kneel down in worship before the mind. The mind contains our being, and what becomes comprehensible (if any writing could really be labeled as such) is only made so by luck and experience. Some will give all the praise to experience—to writing a lot and finding your voice and knowing what you wish to say; to thinking before writing and similar advice spewed out since the dawn of the pen—but I would say all this is vain without luck.
It is luck that we have the minds we have. It is luck that we encounter what we do. It is luck that we have read the books we have. And it is luck that we think what we do when writing. No command is possible without luck allowing it so. To be able to follow that initial idea, to even receive it, and to have considered it good enough to develop, is all out of our command.
The only thing in our command is to exit such a state of inspiration afterwards and reflect on what we ourselves were ignorant of when creating it. Every creation is initially a state of ignorance that becomes known in the act of its creation. We are shaped by it, and that becomes the allegory of our lives.
Every great circus must begin with a few good clowns. So too must our life begin with a few good foundations, some great conceptions that we take delight in, enjoy contemplating, love remembering, and maybe, for the more bold-hearted of us, actually pursue for the sake of our life.
I know of no better idea than the one to which we can hitch our existence. The romantic poet cannot live without an appreciation for what is obscure and exquisite in nature. The novelist cannot subsist without good dialogue. The man cannot continue without a meaning, whether real or artificial, that he can feel confident in, affirmed by, and happy enough to endure.
The miseries and sacrifices that accompany a meaningful life are like nothing to a man secure in his own powers. For a writer, though we are all different, there is a clear sense of power that comes with that difference.
In all the approaches and styles we meet with each day, for the first time—though it be something we encountered the day before—we are told, in a sense, to remake whatever it was that we made previously. In a new way, without hesitation, we must assure ourselves that what we dreaded doing the day before must again be done.
Technique will not save us. Consistency will not save us. Not even the same topic will save us. Only so much time can be dedicated to our thoughts before the act of contemplating becomes slothful. And when that time runs its course, we must either write or perish.
We don’t deserve the noble title of writer unless we understand what it is to write, what it means to play with words, and what it means to think for many hours, days, and months without progress.
The writer is one who examines their life for the sake of illuminating that of others. I never liked, or rather, couldn’t appreciate, writing for writing’s sake. While Wilde’s defense of the aesthete—the artist (writer) solely concerned with beautiful aesthetics for its own sake—was admirable, he never got at the heart of creation.
It made the end product the point. The beauty involved in its creation was relegated to a mere nothing; if it wasn’t beautiful at the end, then all was for naught. Valéry’s approach to find common ground between classical models and changing modern standards was much more my type of ecumenism.
I always felt myself more at home with the French moralist, or with the English essayist, or the German aphorist. The first writer I ever read on my own initiative was Benjamin Franklin—and the influence of his Poor Richard’s Almanac and Silence Dogood Letters no doubt built the core of my writing telos.
I always write with the author in mind, and I never write what I think others will not find useful. I still live under his grand shadow, and what a brilliant shadow it is, considering Franklin was America’s first accomplished writer. He was the first person Europeans thought of when they considered the intellectual culture of the newly formed United States—still very much derided and considered a ‘cultural backwater’ by European standards.
It is from him that I first discovered my love for prose and moral writings, and it is why I continue to write today.
Writing is not merely for our health, I feel. I never write that way anyway. If I didn’t think my experience could aid another in their pursuit of happiness, I would have consigned everything I ever wrote since kindergarten to the flames.
This is why I say every intellectual is a writer, but not every writer is an intellectual. People write for all kinds of reasons, most of which don’t scratch the surface of their true feeling. I never write unless I have a feeling or sense of what I wish to say.
It would be folly to start what is not really meant. It would be to counterfeit sentiment, to tarnish feeling, and to despise honesty and integrity.
Dishonesty in writing is the greatest sin, and it is something all too common today—amongst we human-all-too-human moderns—inspired by nothing else, seemingly, than productivity. In our profession, that means word count, but nobody considers a word count impressive unless every other word has a purpose.
Any baboon can sit down and scribble out a few verses or bash at their keyboard hoping to string a few sentences together, but it’s nearly impossible to write as if you were a stenographer of your heart. That is the truest sign of skill.
The sooner you toss hesitation to the wayside and acquire courage, the sooner you will write what your heart truly feels.
I would consider myself more of a poet than a writer if I may speak my heart, because poets have no pretension or worry about their verses if they come from their own mind in a natural manner. The same approach should always be taken, I think.
To overcomplicate the process is tiresome, and to switch what made you unique is to go against yourself—a thing one should never do.
If I’m to be remembered as anything in these meretricious thoughts, it is as a philosopher of writing. I sought to explore myself in every manner possible:—to follow in the footsteps of Emerson, to live like Schopenhauer, to write like Kierkegaard, to be unconcerned like Cioran, to be stern like Aurelius, and to be remembered like Shakespeare.
Will Durant wanted to know what kind of thing man is. I want to know what kind of man am I. What is it that I think, feel, desire, know, and wish to become? I suppose the question shall forever remain open to me, for, like Cioran, I have no real desire to live in the manner my age wishes me to. An occupation is the death of life, and creativity is impossible—or at the very least stifled—when one must slave for another, without time to really consider one’s thoughts in the meantime.
Then again, when Dumas was a scribe, he found his work easy enough to enjoy contemplations in the act of his work. Perhaps the career for me is one that pays just enough for the bills, and is easy enough to allow my mind to still move about and be active. That would be great.
I tend to think that every difference in our own character is what makes life so tolerable. Could you picture yourself in a world made up of mere parrots—in which everyone thought the same, desired the same, and did the same? This is what is so disturbing about governments that are run by figureheads rather than living, breathing people. They fall prey to authoritarian tendencies. They gather influence and support by deliberately silencing anyone who would willingly speak out against them; and worse, they gather around them sycophants rather than competent advisors.
Nothing better epitomizes the decline of a nation than when its leader thinks themselves the sole power. They are the ultimate narcissist, and they do desire everyone to think as they do. They hate all opposition because it acts as an affront to their power; and they hate most of all an individual with their own turn of mind. They never have the honesty to admit they’re ignorant, and so take their foolishness as a badge of authority.
A phantom always accompanies us when we write. It is to represent the ignorance implicit within our life. Each idea about life carries with it its own story and potential. It’s even more difficult when one considers that life is a paradox with no solution. You could write forever on the same theme and not come one syllable closer to writing truthfully, or acquiring the truth. It is our framing of life that makes it confusing.
Writers, I think, willingly desire no solution to life merely for the sake of being able to continuously write about it. I’ve written enough for today, however. Let everything said up until now be false if, throughout this whole thing, I did not say one true maxim or interesting aphorism. Au revoir.