Tuesday, July 19, 2005
To Digress
I hadn't thought of it before, except perhaps intuitively, that maybe there's a purpose behind artful digression, especially when the intensity of staying on point becomes just a little too much. Don't get me wrong, there's a campsite reserved in paradise for the likes of Driftglass and Whiskey Bar, but sometimes you gotta drift along where the current takes you, even if that means getting caught in a back eddy or two, before being spit out into the ripples leading up to the turbulent whitewater again.
In other words, on occasion, allowing oneself to depart from the main subject of our backwater of the universe--whatever it may be--might be considered a sort of mysterious shortcut to wherever it is we imagine ourselves as heading. Besides, who knows what useful item we might stumble across as we ramble here and there while taking a much needed break from what occupies us.
That said, intentional sidetracking can, if we're not careful, completely displace purposeful initiative to the point where we're content to not achieve anything in particular ever again, except maybe to wander aimlessly in the pursuit of happiness. But I'll leave such philosophical musings for now to our founding fathers and their backup vocals.
For now, I'll just leave you with a short excerpt from Enrique Vila-Matas' new book Bartleby & Co.:
Joseph Joubert was born in Montignac in 1754 and died seventy years later. He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, single-mindedly searching for the right conditions...
In his search for the right conditions to write a book, Joubert discovered a delightful place where he could digress and end up not writing a book at all...In this respect Joubert was one of the first totally modern writers, preferring the centre to the sphere, sacrificing results in order to discover their conditions, and not writing in order to add one book to another, but to seize control of the point from which all books seemed to originate, which, once attained, would exempt him from writing them...
While he searched and amused himself in his digressions, he kept a secret diary of a purely personal nature, which he had no intention of ever publishing. But his friends behaved badly towards him and, on his death, took the liberty in dubious taste of publishing this diary.
In other words, on occasion, allowing oneself to depart from the main subject of our backwater of the universe--whatever it may be--might be considered a sort of mysterious shortcut to wherever it is we imagine ourselves as heading. Besides, who knows what useful item we might stumble across as we ramble here and there while taking a much needed break from what occupies us.
That said, intentional sidetracking can, if we're not careful, completely displace purposeful initiative to the point where we're content to not achieve anything in particular ever again, except maybe to wander aimlessly in the pursuit of happiness. But I'll leave such philosophical musings for now to our founding fathers and their backup vocals.
For now, I'll just leave you with a short excerpt from Enrique Vila-Matas' new book Bartleby & Co.:
Joseph Joubert was born in Montignac in 1754 and died seventy years later. He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, single-mindedly searching for the right conditions...
In his search for the right conditions to write a book, Joubert discovered a delightful place where he could digress and end up not writing a book at all...In this respect Joubert was one of the first totally modern writers, preferring the centre to the sphere, sacrificing results in order to discover their conditions, and not writing in order to add one book to another, but to seize control of the point from which all books seemed to originate, which, once attained, would exempt him from writing them...
While he searched and amused himself in his digressions, he kept a secret diary of a purely personal nature, which he had no intention of ever publishing. But his friends behaved badly towards him and, on his death, took the liberty in dubious taste of publishing this diary.
