I love this essay. For me, in addition to raising the question "What is writing for?", you raise the corollary issue, "What is *reading* for?" Because increasingly it seems that people aren't sure. The growth of the "thought leader" is, I think, paralleled by the growth of people who don't want to be asked to read deeply. The game these …
I love this essay. For me, in addition to raising the question "What is writing for?", you raise the corollary issue, "What is *reading* for?" Because increasingly it seems that people aren't sure. The growth of the "thought leader" is, I think, paralleled by the growth of people who don't want to be asked to read deeply. The game these days seems more about writing that *tells* us what to think rather *asking* us to think. Maybe that isn't new; in fact, I suspect that it probably isn't. But the writers that most interest me have always been the ones who are honestly trying to improve our questions.
I can't put it any better than Rainer Maria Rilke did: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
I love this essay. For me, in addition to raising the question "What is writing for?", you raise the corollary issue, "What is *reading* for?" Because increasingly it seems that people aren't sure. The growth of the "thought leader" is, I think, paralleled by the growth of people who don't want to be asked to read deeply. The game these days seems more about writing that *tells* us what to think rather *asking* us to think. Maybe that isn't new; in fact, I suspect that it probably isn't. But the writers that most interest me have always been the ones who are honestly trying to improve our questions.
I can't put it any better than Rainer Maria Rilke did: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."