★★★☆☆ | Writing | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Guardian Book Review
What a strange little book about essay writing coupled with the author’s lifelong suffering of loss and depression. There were some insights about essay structure and composition that I highlighted (see below), and, reeling from Connor’s death, I was somehow comforted by the author’s repeated declarations of woe. He used writing as a method to stave off his depression, which apparently worked until it didn’t.
Essay Writing as Metaphors for Navigation
The page an estuary, dotted at intervals with typographical buoys or markers. And all the currents or sediments in between: sermons, dialogues, lists and surveys, small eddies of print or whole books construed as single essays. (Location 79)
An uncharted tract or plain. And yet certain ancient routes allow us to pilot our way through to the source, then out again, adventuring. (Location 83)
Essays as Personal Discovery
“What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me.” — Montaigne
Essayism is tentative and hypothetical, and yet it is also a habit of thinking, writing and living that has definite boundaries. It is this combination that I am drawn to in essays and essayists: the sense of a genre suspended between its impulses to hazard or adventure and to achieved form, aesthetic integrity. (Location 180)
Productivity of Writers
I’ve written around three quarters of a million words in these short bursts, which makes my output of books look paltry. I am stupidly proud of this fact; for better and worse I am, it seems, the sort of writer for whom crude and quantified productivity is a value in itself. This is not, in literary terms, a very respectable thing to be; it suggests the author is a hack. (Location 346)
It never feels, as a writer, as if you are being especially productive or prolific; in fact, the more you do the more you are likely to feel that it is not, never will be, enough. (Location 349)
Writing for me is the serial production of fragments that could be composed in a day or two. I would never have written anything if I had not hit upon this rhythm of invention and completion; it’s what allows me, and perhaps many other writers too, to keep a killing anxiety at bay. (Location 354)
Essay Structure and Themes
In every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, “in his thoughts,” he forgets to say what he wants to say. — Adorno
Wit is the art of bringing unlikely things or ideas together, in such a way that the scandal or shock of their proximity arrives alongside a conviction that they have always belonged together. (Location 851)
I thought that every essay should have what I called (privately) its particular “guiding metaphor.” The study and interpretation of a given work of literature was a matter, I imagined, of discovering the metaphor by which it could be described or (so as to distinguish myself, if only a little, from the available critical literature) redescribed. Once I had found this metaphor—sometimes it was obvious, but I preferred it when not—then the essay would in some real sense write itself, the figure unfolding and fulfilling its promise. (Location 1176)
Depression
At the time my concentration and motivation were so bad that I had taken to reading computer magazines instead of the books I was meant to be mining for my Ph.D.—the mind was somehow soothed by mere stupid information. (Location 1275)
In the summer of 1997 I used to fall into bed after midnight and jolt alert again around four in the morning. It was the first time I had suffered from the depressive’s common symptom of early-morning waking: it is one of the things they will ask you about if you present to the professionals sounding as though you are depressed. (Location 1277)
As the depression lifted and life intervened, it was possible to think that the pain was not exactly in the past, but might be contained, left in a kind of suspended animation, floating between then and now. (Location 1464)