Bringing It All Together

Writing and Working Through

Hi everyone,

My apologies for not posting in a while! As I may or may not have said, I am a senior in college studying philosophy. I have been working on a senior thesis, which has, for the most part, been eating up most of my writing energy. My semester ends in a few weeks, so I will have more to say then!

As I wrote yesterday, though, I had quite an interesting experience. One I wanted to share with you, I think because it might say something about the nature of memory and writing.

c. Thomas Cole, ‘The Voyage of Life: Youth’

To set the scene: I have been experiencing a severe case of writer’s block. In my thesis, I am trying to levy an objection against a number of philosophical theories—that, in one way or another, they don’t leave space for our personalities. They force us to pretend as if we are not ourselves, to pretend, for instance, that we are utility calculating computers or, on the other hand, eminently rational beings with complete control over our emotions.

A friend, however, gave me a great objection. Don’t we sometimes think of ourselves in this way? Isn’t it useful? When we are torn about what to do, for instance, isn’t it normal for us to ‘abstract away from ourselves’ in order to make a decision?

I think this is right, but I had no clue what to say to it at the time. It was unsettling. So simple (and obvious!) an objection—one that I had, nonetheless, simply not thought of! Worse, it seemed to me right. Perhaps my whole argument was simply wrong. Perhaps I should have just thrown my thesis away.

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This did not feel great. But I was convinced there was a response to this objection. There must be! For a while, though, I did not know what to say—I did not know what this response was. I had a faint belief, though, that it was there. That it was waiting to be found if I only looked hard enough.

And I tried to look hard! I returned to some of the classic philosophers: I reread some Sartre, Plato, and even Proust. I was falling, flailing, looking for something to grab on to, something that could save this project—a project that, at this point, I had become quite emotionally attached to.

But suddenly, yesterday, I stopped looking to other people. And this wasn’t a conscious decision, either. I was disinterestedly binging a procedural crime drama, when I had a sudden flashback to a class I took at the end of my sophomore year. In the course, I had written about some psychological concept. And, lo and behold, once I got to thinking about it, the topic of my writing—the writing I had done two years prior—offered a perfect solution to the problem I faced in the here and now.

I hurriedly tried to put the idea to paper before I lost it. To capture the clarity that I had suddenly found—a clarity located not within other philosophers, but within myself.

Once I did, though, once I got it all down, I was surprised. How the hell did this happen? How could I have found the solution to a problem that didn’t yet, for me, exist? And, further, why did I forget such an important paper until yesterday?

It strikes me that this is a feature of a more general law of writing. We rarely ask questions that we have not, ourselves, in some parallel part of our lives, already answered. The workplace of the writer, after all, is not the lab, but the café. We do not discover, but uncover what is already there, what is hidden or forgotten. Writing, then, is, in its own way, a form of memory: an activity of connecting parts of our lives we once thought irrelevant and separate.

What is so puzzling, though, is how we could have known that this other part of our lives, this part, once irrelevant and forgettable, could be an answer to the question we ask today. Perhaps by the time we lift the pen or click the keyboard, our question has already, deep down, been answered. Maybe that is what we are uncovering.