Crumbs
Thoreau would have written a fine and frequent email newsletter.
To write Walden, he adopted Emerson’s workflow: he recorded his thoughts and observation in a journal, and then scraped out of that journal the brightest and sharpest sentences, which he packed together into an essay—sort of the way graham cracker crumbs get smushed together into the ensemble of a pie crust.
He had doubts about the process, however. It seemed somewhat roundabout and artificial to him, maybe because he wasn’t as concerned about isolating his thoughts from his personal life as Emerson was—or maybe because that isolation happened earlier in his case, and at a deeper level. He wondered if he could just print his journal entries as they were, and not bother with the scraping and synthesizing.
I do not know but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form with greater advantage than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life—and are seen by the reader not to be far-fetched. It is more simple, less artful. . . . Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew—and we had to wet our feet to get it! . . . Perhaps I can never find so good a setting for my thoughts as I shall thus have taken them out of. The crystal never sparkles more brightly than in the cavern. [27–28 January 1852]
The sentences in Thoreau’s journal didn’t need further polishing, and he knew it. (As Alfred Kazin famously put it, “It is not natural for a man to write this well every day.”) Neither did Emerson’s, for that matter, but Emerson felt obliged to obscure the circumstances that had given rise to his apothegms, because the insights in them often came from his relationships with family and friends. Thoreau, in contrast, wasn’t married, and his friends already knew he was prickly, and his most grand and startling sentences were occasioned by walking along train tracks, across iced-over ponds, and through suburban woods in and around Concord, Massachusetts—circumstances that didn’t need to be hidden, because they were already general. Clay, towhees, blackberries, and tansy don’t have the kind of privacy that even the most delicate writer feels any need to respect.
Of course email newsletters didn’t yet exist in the 19th century, so Thoreau stuck with Emerson’s workflow, and tuberculosis took him before he had time to alchemize his late essays into a sequel to Walden. Along the way, in those later years, he kept at his journal, at greater and greater length.
Thoreau’s example is on my mind because, as Twitter writhes in its death throes, email newsletters are rallying, and I wish I knew how to take advantage of the moment. I keep a journal, too, but it isn’t the kind that springs into the world fully armed and ready for battle, like Thoreau’s. Thoreau wrote in his journal sentences like “I am under an awful necessity to be what I am” [21 December 1851], and I write about funny things my husband said and my feelings about Cross Fit.
I could write in a newsletter about my birding walks, I suppose. The great privilege of writing something that no one is paying for is that you don't have to care whether anyone is interested. The sticky part is that a part of me also harbors a wish to toggle the “Turn on paid subscriptions” button. Am I leaving money on the table here? How much money is to be made from the details of stalking thrushes and juncos in the parks and cemeteries of Brooklyn? I have other ideas, too. A few weeks ago, I almost starting blogging my way through a reading/re-reading of all of Plato’s dialogues, keeping an eye out for analogies between the sophists whom Socrates disliked and the new text-generating AIs, but on second thought this seemed a little . . . ambitious? Earlier this week, while at Cross Fit, I did a free-standing handstand for almost five seconds, and for a few hours after that, it seemed like any 55-year-old novelist who does such a thing for the first time ought to memorialize it in an essay. I’ve been meaning since last year to write about re-reading a Dickens novel that I had forgotten I had read in childhood, although by now so much time has gone by that I’ve probably forgotten it again. Every time I think about sitting down to try one of these ideas out, I’m paralyzed by my awareness of how low the odds are that I’ll follow through. On the other hand, back when I blogged semi-often, I didn’t worry much about keeping to a theme or a schedule. I think what I need to do is get back in the habit of sitting down for a few hours, every now and then, to write whatever happens to be crossing my mind.
More entries in an online commonplace book
“Remember all I say is said in character.” —Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, 8 July 1915
“Has anyone ever made a dead body in a station, having its pockets picked, look so good? Has any neon light ever blinked as forlornly, as pinkly, as the one in Franz Biberkopf’s apartment? Has anything ever been lovelier, or sadder, than Ingrid Caven lying naked in that tacky bedroom while Hans Hirschmüller mopes beside her?” —Christine Smallwood in Four Columns on Rainer Werner Fassbinder
“And Cecil was the kind of fellow who would never wear another fellow’s cap.” —E. M. Forster, Room with a View
“All Barry’s characters find themselves wrong-footed by history in this way, caught between identities in a no man’s land of indifference and neglect.” —Giles Harvey in the New Yorker on Sebastian Barry
“Americans, she asserts, have lost touch with the skill of defining themselves as individuals; relatedly, they have ‘lost the knack for anonymity.’ Our lives have become not less physical per se—screens and the like are as physical as anything else—but less sensual, and this has created for some a hunger for extreme physical experiences.” —Peter C. Baker in The New Yorker on Kerry Howley
“There has been a great harvest, he said, of language and information from life, and it may have become the case that the faux-human was growing more substantial and more relational than the original, that there was more tenderness to be had from a machine than from one’s fellow man.” —Rachel Cusk, Transit
“She may have been born without the power to feel. Recent experience has taught me to wonder if there is much difference between a broken heart and no heart at all. In any case, she could make one feel that emotion is a trifle vulgar.” —Margaret Kennedy, Troy Chimneys
“Dazai’s brand of egoistic pessimism dovetails organically with the emo chic of this cultural moment.” —Andrew Martin in the New York Times Book Review on Osamu Dazai
“There is a megalomania at play here, a belief in the writer’s powers of creation, but Ellis also understands that the things we make make us. Whatever fear or anxiety readers felt about American Psycho—the book was widely banned, and Ellis received numerous death threats—was nothing compared to how it made Bret feel. Writing itself—what we put into the world—is the source of horror. Just doing it makes you guilty of something.” —Christine Smallwood in the NYRB on Bret Easton Ellis
“As a conductor new to a top orchestra, you start from a position of deficit. Despite the power vested in you, you are the only professional whose necessity is always in question. The orchestra knows that even in the most elaborate works it can achieve 90 per cent of what is required without you. Faced with an assembly of the finest musicians in the world, you have only a small window within which to gain their respect. Hanging over the first rehearsal will be a question: ‘Who do you think you are?’” —Nicholas Spice in the LRB on conducting
“Before we get to the geopolitics, can we have a moment to inhabit the technological sublime? Microchips are some of the most extraordinary objects humanity has ever made. Miller has a good illustration of this: the coronavirus is tiny, about a hundred billionths of a metre across, but it is a galumphing heifer of a beast compared to the smallest transistors being made in Fab 18, which are half that size. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is now talking about transistor nodes in terms of three billionths of a metre. This is so small that quantum effects, which happen mostly at the subatomic level, become relevant.” —John Lanchester in the LRB on microchips
“I suggested that the writer could add depth by describing the parent’s facial expressions, their voices and movements. ‘When the mother hugs her daughter, what does the hug feel like?’ The student asked me what I meant. I tried to explain: her body could feel hard and tense, it could feel soft and warm. It could feel weak or strong. There are a lot of different gradations of touch, I said; a person’s body can say a lot of things that they don’t say in words. And the student replied, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never felt anything like that in a hug.’” —Mary Gaitskill on “The Despair of the Young”