About a year and a half ago, I created this blog with every intention of posting regularly. I figured it would be easy to crank out between 1,500 and 2,000 words every few days. I imagined that, within a year or so, I would have written a few dozen essays on various topics. Of course, our hopes are often dashed by reality. Despite my efforts – I nearly said ‘best efforts’ – I have not completed a single essay or made any posts, even of shorter length, on this blog. I started to write probably 7 or 8 different essays but, for one reason or another, they all remain far from completion.
I suppose this is a common problem. Many people have the desire to write – either as leisure or work – partly because it seems straightforward and can be done almost entirely independently. A writer does not need colleagues, a staff, managers, or, in practice, really any resources except a computer and an internet connection to begin. A would-be writer can start a blog – like the one you, dear reader(s), are currently reading – in about half an hour at no greater cost than $100. Possibly $150, if our would-be writer is an aesthete and wants a fine theme to improve the blog’s look.
More importantly, everyone has ideas and everyone believes that these ideas are especially worth sharing. To some degree, this is not an ironic comment, even if to some degree it is. Most people do, indeed, have interesting and unique perspectives on most topics which have broad appeal. Each individual’s experience is necessarily unique and this uniqueness can provide the basis for original work. The primary difficulties consist of an individual becoming fully conscious and attuned to this uniqueness and the practical challenge of translating what we understand to be unique in ourselves into language – such as via an essay – that is comprehensible to others.
The ‘practical challenge of translating…’ is, I think, the greater of the two difficulties. For one, it is difficult to clarify in language what might be fully appreciated in thought. I can think something – or know something – and not be capable of expressing my thoughts or knowledge into language. I can know, for example, that green differs from yellow, but not be able to explain precisely how or why this is the case. I could, perhaps, do so if I acquired additional knowledge about colors, light, and the human eye, for example, but the basic insight that green is different than yellow is, without additional knowledge which helps clarify the distinction, simply a vague, even if superficially true, insight. At least the insight is provisionally true enough to not be dismissed as ridiculous and therefore might justify the expenditure of time and effort to conduct additional research about it, if the question is important enough to me. This difficulty is all the more apparent when we attempt to advance opinions, based on insight, on more controversial topics such as history, philosophy, literary criticism, etc. There really is no general consensus on the answer to any important question regarding any of these topics. We can establish certain facts but the interpretation of any of those facts will always be subject to challenges from competing interpretations. In attempting to give our own interpretation, we are inviting criticism and exposing ourselves to the judgment of the public and, in many cases, members of the public who have much greater knowledge on the subject in question than ourselves.
On the one hand, this should not be a deterrent. In fact, we know that if we advance a view which is subsequently challenged and proven untenable, we benefit by thereby becoming more aware of the things we do not know. This process – a literary dialectic – is perhaps the best reason to write, especially on difficult topics which matter to us in our own lives. Moreover, our own standards of thought are elevated by having to prepare our analysis and position before the writing process even begins. Because we know that what we are going to say is going to be put before a critical audience, we are compelled to work hard to ensure there are no obvious defects in our presentation of the facts and our argument. This is a form of accountability. By making our opinions accountable to others, we raise our own standards of thought, if for no other reason than to avoid appearing as if we neglected to put any serious effort into developing our opinions.
The challenge, of course, is that this requires effort. That is the core of the entire issue. If we want to write – and write in a way that does not make us appear completely foolish to others – we need to work hard to not only express what it is we want to say but also to formulate and clarify our thinking beforehand.
Yet, strangely, this ‘beforehand’ may undervalue writing as a means to develop our thinking. As we write, we make concrete what had previously existed only in our minds. We evaluate what we have just written and see if it is true, or dubious, or outright false. We recognize, numerous times through the course of our writing, where we possess only a shaky understanding of the facts themselves. We perform additional research to ensure we understand, in the first place, what we are trying to discuss. The writing process is, therefore, one of the best ways to establish what we actually think, even before we have put something before the public and received feedback on it. Clear writing reflects clear thinking.
But we also must guard against being perfectionist in this. We can never be fully satisfied with what we have written or what we think. We must accept, at a certain point, that our position is ‘good enough’ to warrant publication. We should not be hasty in deciding that something is ‘good enough’ but we must eventually make this decision if we want to finish any of our work. This is not only true for writing but, really, for everything. One of the key traits, I think, of those who manage to consistently achieve their goals is a willingness to accept imperfections in their work. The desire to continue to refine something until we are completely satisfied is crippling. Nothing gets done. This not to imply that achievement is completely unconnected from quality – for something to be excellent, it is not enough for it to simply be finished – but that we spend more time thinking about whether what we have produced will do honor to us and adequately reflect our capabilities than we should.
Much of this, with writing as with everything, can be solved by the development of habits, goal setting, and by adopting a mindset that focuses on the process rather than on the results. Time pressure – i.e. deadlines – can be a useful tool to overcome the problem arising from perfectionism described above, but I think that having a clearly-defined, overarching objective, the achievement of which constitutes success, is the most important element contributing to ultimate success or failure. For example, I can plan, over the next several years, to publish 100 essays on this blog by writing daily to develop the habit of writing and to become increasingly comfortable with imperfect work. Presumably, after having written 100 essays, my abilities as a writer – and the quality of my thought and work – will have improved much more markedly than if I spent the next several years thinking about the best way(s) to write a blog until starting to do so. We learn most by doing and experience is the best teacher.
From a subject matter perspective, the original post I made here in April last year does, more or less, capture my intentions for this blog. I have always been fascinated by historical essays. My literary model, Thomas Macaulay, is the inspiration for my nom de plume. I think that the essay is an effective vehicle to convey analysis on a wide variety of topics. I doubt that I could sustain any effort to write consistently for very long if I did not allow myself to delve into a wide variety of topics. As a reader, I have always preferred works written in a clear style on topics of historical and literary significance rather than on potentially more challenging scientific and philosophical issues. I enjoy biographical sketches – such as those written by Will Durant, for example – on individuals who were primarily known as philosophers, as I feel this approach is a straightforward way to understand their thought through the context-rich prism of intellectual history. No thought or system can be considered wholly original; if we are to read any philosopher without some understanding of their intellectual pedigree and historical context, we will almost certainly fail to grasp key elements of their ideas.
One other important reason why I prefer such authors and works is, simply, that they are more readable. It may betray a degree of intellectual laziness on my part, but I do not particularly enjoy struggling through long, difficult texts, which present their authors’ meaning primarily with abstractions. I unsurprisingly, therefore, gravitate toward history, seeing as it is concerned with essentially concrete incidences, deployed either as elements of a continuous narrative or as the subject matter for analysis. Machiavelli, who is probably more of a philosopher than an historian, comes to mind as relying on the latter category to convey thought; Gibbon, for example, relies more on the former. The form of the Discorsi – which uses historical examples as the matter for a philosophical exegesis – are undoubtedly a model I will seek to adopt in some of my posts here. I will also eventually dedicate an essay to The Decline and Fall, which is among my favorite books.
All of which is to say, I intend to write here more frequently and consistently, if for no other reasons than to challenge myself to remain committed to a larger goal and to improve my own understanding of many of the topics that fascinate me.