More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Unread
In Defence of the Unread
I read this today from Nassim Taleb: “The point [is] that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage, but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you don’t know as your financial means allows you to put there." 1
I don’t always find Taleb comforting. Incomparably stimulating, rudely enlightening, disarmingly wise, irreplaceably salient, always. But never comforting. Until this morning.
I was thinking about the books in my study, about how many I have not read, how many I want to read, how many I am actually reading all at once. And I noticed a bit of guilt as I surveyed my personal library. There were lots, lots, I have not read.
And then that Taleb comment popped up in research I was doing for my writing, and miraculously the guilt fizzled, and in no time I was feeling proud of the number of unread books I have. Not exactly proud, I guess. More like okay. Like a not-bad person. Like a person who loves to learn and intends to read masses more before she dies, and practically lives for the written word, reading it and writing it. Like me, I guess. The real and now acceptable me.
Taleb wouldn’t care about all of that slightly agonized self defining, I suspect. But I thank him anyway. And now I spend some of my early morning time gazing at my books, imagining that they love each other as much as I love them, read or unread. Judgement-free. Pleased just to be, and to be with me.
Books are friends, after all.
1 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007
C L I C H É S
Why They Are Boring and Should Be Banned
A cliché is a sentence that bores immediately.
Like:
“Think outside the box.”
Boring at “outside.”
“Time will tell.”
Boring at “will.”
“The darkest hour is just before the dawn.”
Boring at “hour.”
“She is growing by leaps and bounds.”
Boring at “by.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Boring at “kill.”
“He’s just a bull in a china shop.”
Boring at “bull.”
The very second we know what comes next, we’re snoring.
And this matters. In fact, inflicting boredom on anyone is a sin in my book / says this worshipper of linguistic sparkle. Humans just shouldn’t be bored. Life is too short / languishes when brain-bashed by boredom. Ask anyone who has been whacked by a cliché in the past week. Ask them how much sleep they got after the first two words. Ask them how they, nevertheless, managed to look engaged, nodding their way through cliché lethargy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if the very duration of friendships can be predicted by how many clichés a friend inflicts per visit. Human conversations do not want to go gentle into that good night / collapse of their own weight / fall down a rat hole / die from I-know-how-you-are-going-to-finish-that-sentence ennui.
So here is a tip: good sentences startle. They proceed without precedent. Clichés Don’t. They put us to sleep / anaesthetise us.
It is our duty / our worth-the-search triumph to think before we speak / scan for clichés ahead and turn the sign 90 degrees.
In fact, I think it may be our sacred obligation as blessed-with-language mammals to baptise our expressiveness into cliché obsolescence, and demand of our language-loving selves never-tried-before marriages of words.
And if in conversation we fear we will seem slow as we take time to generate a fresh phrase, we can at least de-cliché (not sure about verbifying that – or that!) our writing. No reader will ever know how long mine-sweeping our clichés took. They will just be grateful for the vigour of what they read. They won’t know exactly what is stirring about it, what is transfixing, what makes them glow and want more.
They will never know (unless we tell them so that they can begin to crater clichés in their own writing) the care we took to ensure that our piece sang.
But we will.
Books
If “books” rhymed with anything relevant, I would write a poem about them. But it doesn’t (brooks, cooks, crooks, hooks, looks, nooks, snooks, schnooks, rooks). Hopeless.
So I will write a paean.
Books are mighty. Books are angels. Books embrace. Books bow. Books reach. Books thank. Books shape.
Real books. The ones you can hold in your hands. The ones whose pages you caress and listen to as they turn. Books you put your name in or sign for a friend. Books that are a singular self, ambling, not a highway pileup, vying.
Books with a grosgrain ribbon to hold your place or just a scrap of paper you tore in a hurry, saying, “I’ll be back.” Books, I am sure, love that promise.
Real books furnished my childhood home. In their korina shelves they comprised two of the four long walls of our main room. Mother adored books. Without question I absorbed that passion from her. My father loved books, too, but with less of himself defined by them. My twin also loved them and used a whole wall for them in his own home. My big sister's huge full bookcase graces her downsized home right now.
But Mother was our font. She touched books as if they were people, tenderly, with permission. And when paperbacks crashed into the reading world and into the personal libraries of friends, she held out her arm full length, hand pointing up. No. There would be no paperbacks in her library.
Real books, whether hardback or paper, are an “aesthesis.” They are a five-senses engagement. I do not want to think about what my mother would say about e-books. All of the body-felt experience gone. Nothing beckoning from the shelves. Why would you agree to that? Why? She would move, I am sure, from dismay to distrust to dismissal. I do the same. But paperbacks are all right with me, among the hardbacks. There is less substance, I agree; but fingers, hands, shelves still engage with them. They can love and be loved. E-books cannot.
In March this year I wrote about unread books as a phenomenon in personal libraries. I also described there the love I have for my own library, read and unread. It populates the south wall of my study. Each book is worn in different ways. Some were my mother’s 90 years ago, some my twin’s 25 years ago, some written by people I know, some bought by me, old and new.
I see them all at a glance – the colours, the textures, the heights, their touching of others on either side, their beaming a whole, a feast potential and had.
When the human mind engages with physical substance, something fundamental happens. Relationships happen.
Snuggling happens. Finding one’s place happens. Knowing happens. With electrons, photons, silicon, radiation, liquid crystals, and electrophoretic ink, nothing happens.Yes, we can carry 8,000 books in a fit-in-the bag chunk of glass and plastic along with its wire lung. And if multiple volumes in one hand are what we want, fine. If backlighting is essential, okay. But plugging in and clicking, we then can see only one book’s physical substanceless, swipe-dependent self at a time, and only one page at a time. We cannot see, we cannot hold, its wholeness.
I want to see a book’s self. I want to feel it. I want to hear it. All of it, all at once.
I want to hold its chalice.
1 "Unread” (formerly called “Books”)
The Real Reason For Writing It Ourselves
I am a writer. I adore writing. I love the beauties that suddenly emerge, the words that come when I look away, the unrequested insights that flash while I am writing. I love the searches: for the perfect word, for the finest alignment of concept and context, for the thing I actually, actually want to say; and the research, the learning, the occasional delicious derailment.
I love the inevitable certainty that a final draft is final, setting it aside for the night, and discovering with the sun that at least fifteen things need to change. I love making those changes. I love what they do to the rest of the piece. I love seeing that I don’t need nearly as many words as I thought, and then paring it until it teems with that irrepressible, irreplaceable shimmer of succinctness.
I love writing as myself, casually, as if I were talking to the reader (best advice I ever received about writing). I love reading a draft to Christopher to see what delights, engages, concerns him, what questions he has, how he would change it. I love returning to my desk to integrate what I agree is important. I love the good, better, best climb of that.
Most of all, and most importantly, I love the duet that is writing and thinking. As I write, I think. So I write and so I think and so I write and so I think. I love that it is one living thing. One. It is writingthinking. And in that truth lies the point of this piece:
AI writing is murder.
Using AI to write for us is not just stealing other people’s ideas and words and constructs, which it is. It is not just lying ("I wrote this"), which it is. AI writing for us actually kills. It kills the process that is writingthinking. It murders the ignition of thought that would have come from our own writing of the sentences.
That is the point. When we write, we think. And so we must not agree to fail to think because we failed to write, because we failed to say "no" to the current #1 seducer author: AI.
I’m not alone in this conviction. Other writers and thinkers say the same thing. Compelling recently was Margaret Heffernan’s Substack piece called, “Use It or Lose It: The challenge of AI” (https://heffernanm.substack.com/p/use-it-or-lose-it-the-challenge-of). Among many invaluable things she says there is this gem:
Writing is a form of thinking; it is as I’m shaping a sentence that I’m teasing out precisely what it is I believe, and what feelings and thoughts I seek to communicate. It is when I’m editing that I identify connections between ideas, people or attitudes. It is in re-reading that I notice, and may modify, a tone that isn’t quite right – thus making me consider carefully my relationship between reader and writer. Writing is how I develop and discover what I believe to be true.
Exactly.
I suspect that Heffernan loves writing, and that she believes in herself as a writer. You, on the other hand, may not. You may live in combat with writing.
Maybe writing has been a chore, never a choice. Maybe you wrote things when you were young that were skewered by the person you naively asked to read them. Maybe your writing teacher told you you could not write, that you should concentrate on numbers instead. Maybe other teachers gave you "A"s for content and "F"s for expression. Maybe your teachers or parents hurried you.
I am sorry, if so. Those people were killers, too. Innocent but guilty.
And now AI, most commonly the ubiquitous, puffy-chested, do-it-for-you ChatGPT, is bludgeoning your writer-self’s almost-corpse. It sits there ready to seal any chances of your writer resurrection.
Again, I am sorry.
There is, however and hooray, a way to block Its mallets in midair. Write. Just write. Do it. Sit down, put your fingers on the keys, or the pencil in your hand, and go. Write until you know what you really want to say. Write until your voice begins to form. Let me be the one in your life who said, "Write casually, as if you were talking to the reader." Connect with those readers. Tell them what you really think, and feel, and want to say.
Write.
Most of all, don’t worry about syntax, or grammar, or paragraphing, or capitalising, or even spelling (watch out, though, for Siri’s incorrect corrections!). Just write.
When you read it over, or even better, out loud to yourself, revel in what is working, what is really you. Then with a bounce, tweak what isn’t. Then go to bed.
Re-read the whole thing in the morning, and smile at the changes you now want to make because time and sleep caressed you as a writer for nearly eight hours. Enjoy every minute. Your piece is good if it says what you want to say, and says it as you, and speaks to the reader.
Of course academic pieces have to groan themselves into girdles of form. That is a different journey, one that can suck the true writer-self right out of the screed. But you can get help with that from a human who can love you and honour you as they help you, and as you produce an acceptable product. Write those essays. Get your degree. Then run to the prettiest wildflower field you can find, and fly the kite that is you the writer.
Be you. That is all you need to do. Use AI for prodigiously quick searches that inform, but do not form. Be you. Don’t try to be Margaret Heffernan, or Brian Doyle, or Lewis Thomas or Maya Angelou, or Carlo Rovelli, or Marcus Aurelius. They are all nobodies when it comes to being you.
What would you like to say? How would you write it? What do you really think? Who better is there – what better is there – than you to write it, than you to think it, than you to write it, than you to think it, than you to write it, than you to think it?