Monday, September 16, 2024
6:35 a.m. Intimations of mortality, Jon. An awful lot of work I might have done and didn’t. More I might do, if I had (have?) time?
You are at least beginning to see the tradeoffs. Nothing comes free. If you are going to do one thing, maybe you can’t do something else – and if you are driven to read, read, read – or do crosswords, or sometimes to watch movies or TV episodes – maybe it is keeping you from doing other things.
Tell me something I don’t know.
You don’t know why.
Very true. And you can tell me.
I can tell you if you can hear. Avoidance is not merely inertia. It takes as much effort to avoid – sometimes more – than to do what you’re avoiding doing. So it isn’t just that you don’t have enough energy to concentrate your mind on something. It is that the “something” does not lend you that energy, where other times it does.
Jim S. would suspect interference.
And so do you, sometimes.
But not usually.
But there is a vast difference between sometimes and never. It is a qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference like less and more.
I see that. I may quote that sentence by itself. But, go on.
You find yourself again browsing through Bowers on Jefferson. You know things mostly forgotten or never even suspected by most of your contemporaries. There is a feeling “I ought to write this,” and a feeling of inability.
Ah, because I am always thinking in terms of books, not essays.
That’s part of it. If you have an insight, say it. It doesn’t have to be supported by – or suffocated by – all the detail you could put it to. Think of your many successful squibs about history on your blog. They are successful – even if nobody read them they would be successful – in that they make something living out of what otherwise had been dead.
You mean, they express something in an alive way that had been deadened by its treatment or by the silence about it.
Yes. But suppose you had to write a book about each blog post subject. (a) You couldn’t do it. (b) Who’d read it all? The books are on shelves. The bare bones information is in Wikipedia or other sites. None of your contributions is original research, it is interpretation, and as you know, those are the only two contributions an historian can make.
I’m getting that I could write an essay a day from whatever I happened to be reading, and post that.
You could, theoretically. What else did you do for so many years, beginning with Smallwood and continuing with Rita and others? The fact that you gathered it into books may have distracted you from the fact that each was, in effect, a thousand-word essay.
My horoscope did say that was my strength, small pieces. Naturally, cross-grained as I am, I determined that only writing books was worth doing.
You didn’t have the patience or the knowledge to go the magazine route. You didn’t know the market, didn’t know how to learn it, never thought to ask anybody.
All true.
But you can still write. Let others pick up the slack of getting the word out. In fact, let the material itself carry the word. People can always google the subject matter.
It still seems like writing on water, like writing editorials that wind up under somebody’s bird cage.
You’re missing the point, which is to give you a forum that will allow you – encourage you – to express what you know in a way that may encourage others to learn more. Isn’t that what you started out to do with your original blog? “Everyday explorations into our unsuspected potential”?
True enough. And I see that unless it was gathered into books, it felt like I was just passing the time.
So?
As I’m thinking about it, I see that in a way this is what Emerson was always doing, writing about this or that, gathering the essays together after a while and winding up with another book.
No!
No?
Yes the essays were made into books, but you’re missing the fact that he was continually lecturing. That material went into lectures, and was given to people first-hand, before it made it into the hard covers. That was his equivalent of a blog, you see.
So the missing link is not a publisher of my essays-into-books but a dissemination of the existence of the blogs.
Perhaps. But your end of it is to be the source of the information. Only you can put your spin on what you have read and thought about. Just as all your authors were the ones to distill source material into their interpretations, so you. That’s how it works.
That’s very interesting. Let’s go back to the subject of avoidance.
You know that authors have to work to a schedule. They don’t work just when they feel like. If they have to waste several hours not accomplishing anything, they do. It is the only way to defeat the avoidance mechanism that says, “This is more work than you have energy for. This is flat and not worthwhile. You aren’t up for this.” Sometimes you have to outsit that.
Why should we have to? What produces that mechanism?
Concentration means just that: centering. It takes an effort of will sometimes. When it doesn’t, when for whatever reason you are ready and able to go, you take it for granted. But when you aren’t concentrated, we’re back to the question of mood. In a sense, your mood says, “This is too much trouble right now,” and you mistake your self for your mood.
Say that in different words?
This is where will-power and habit and workmanlike methods come in. It is a matter of overcoming the mood of a moment with the sustained intent that overrides the mood and says, “Nevertheless, it’s time to work.” If you have a job or a profession that pressures you to work, that helps. If you are on your own, you have to be your own pressure, and that is going to involve will-power and sustained intent.
You make it very clear.
There’s much to be said about moods and how they shape people’s daily experience, and maybe we’ll get to it. That’s mostly up to you.
I’m getting that we sometimes say “moods” or “emotions” where we mean the other.
I’m laughing. You’d never let me get away with phrasing like that!
Smiling too. All right, let’s put it this way: The guys have told us that emotion is the interface between our known self and the unknown self that we experience as the outside world. But what someone might call emotion, someone else might call mood.
And this isn’t because psychology hasn’t clearly differentiated them – regardless what laymen know – but that everybody makes his own definitions, mostly unconsciously, and so everybody hears something difference even if the word is the same. The way around that is to do just as we’re doing – talk about it so people can do their own figuring out what each words means to them.
Well, it’s always a pleasure talking with you.
Likewise.
Next time, then.