Why I Write

Half of this was originally published in January 2012; the other half is new. Click here for a printer-friendly version of this blog post.

Artwork: Memory Jar, by Donato Giancola

Why I Write

This morning I was thinking about how I preoccupied I used to be with my blog stats. I would obsess about how many clicks each blog post got, and when the numbers were higher or lower than average, I'd wrack my brain to figure out why, so that I could keep giving the public what they wanted.

This obsession proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helped me to be a better writer, since I cared about the number of regular readers I had. On the other hand, it created undue pressure which often made it harder to write.

This got me thinking about why I write, in general.

Specifically, it got me thinking about why I have cared less and less about numbers with each year that goes by. And, as writers are wont to do, I had a desire to write about this topic.

At first I planned to write out my own thoughts on this matter. However, I've been perusing what other writers have written about writing - many of whom write for the same reasons as I do. In this post, I'd like to share some of these excerpts. Maybe some day I'll write my own post on why I write.

Here are excerpts from three writers whose reasons for writing align with my own:

George Orwell: Writing for "Political" Purposes

I'll begin with a short quotation from George Orwell's Why I Write (1946). Orwell states that "Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose." Of these four motives, I find that I relate most to the fourth, which he terms "political purpose." He explains that he is "using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." Here is the paragraph that jumped out to me:

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, "I am going to produce a work of art." I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. 

I have chosen to lead with this Orwell quotation because it reflects my original motive for writing. When I was in high school I used to want to be a journalist. Once I converted to Judaism and began learning Torah, some of that journalistic zeal and integrity (in that order) became diverted towards the goal of bringing awareness to "authentic Judaism." As a convert who found himself among many FFB (frum from birth) Jews who didn't understand what they were doing or why they were doing it, I felt the urge to reveal the truth that I had learned and share it with others. 

Unfortunately, due to the sorry state that Klal Yisrael is in - and due to my fiery personality - many of these posts ended up with a greater emphasis on sur me'ra ("turn away from bad") than aseh tov ("do good"). My old blog was filled with polemical posts and polemical language. I really didn't hold back, especially when I felt that "sense of injustice ... because there is some lie that I want to expose." 

Over the years I've definitely dialed down the tone in my writing and teaching. I now focus more on what Torah is than what Torah is not. Yet, there is still a strong political character (as defined by Orwell) to my writing, which is also present in my teaching. I am still passionate when it comes to sharing my understanding of Judaism and contrasting it with other views that are out there. I'm just not as "in your face" as I was in my younger days. 
William Stafford: Writing for Discovery

The next few excerpts are from A Way of Writing (1970) by the poet William Stafford. (Full disclosure: I'm not a poetry guy, and haven't read any of Stafford's writings except for what I'm about to share.) This first quotation is the main reason why I write:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or--but wait! …

For me, writing is a method of thinking. I can achieve a depth of understanding and a degree of clarity in writing that I can't obtain in any other way. Most of the time when I set out to write a blog post, the full idea isn't completely formed in my mind. The process of writing brings the idea to fruition. 

Stafford continues with a point that touches upon one of the major obstacles I face from time to time: the unwillingness to allow myself to "fail":

I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards. I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By "standards" I do not mean "correctness" spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, etc. ... I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others -- and maybe I myself -- will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.

I write best when I'm not worried about meeting my self-imposed standards. I have learned to ignore my inner need to write chidushim (innovations), or posts of "importance," or posts that people will care about. The ability to do this has not come easily. I have written about this struggle at length in Playing with Torah and Am I Qualified to Write this Blog? 

Chazal (Avos 4:1) teach: "ein ha'bayshan lomeid" ("One who is embarrassed doesn't learn"). If you wish to advance when learning with your rebbi, with your chavrusa, or even by yourself, you must be willing to "fail." I use the quotation marks because I don't consider this to be a failure. To realize that you've erred is a success, since it allows you to move closer to the truth.

When I write a blog post, I know it's possible that I'll make mistakes - but if I allowed this to stop me, then my writing would suffer, and so would my learning. (And so would the readers who gain from what I write.)

Stafford concludes with a beautiful summary of the activity of writing:

[Writing] itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision.

I thrive off of this experience of freedom in the process of writing. This is what allows me to sit down and write in an uninterrupted flow for hours on end. The joy of intellectual exploration and expression is intoxicating.

Richard Mitchell: Writing for Self-knowledge

The third and final excerpt is from a speech given by one of my favorite writers, Richard Mitchell. The speech, entitled Writing Against Your Life (1986), was given by Mitchell at a writers' conference in Southern Carolina. This speech became the basis of Richard Mitchell's greatest book, The Gift of Fire (1999), which is one of my favorite books of all time.

I am really tempted to excerpt the entire speech, but I'm afraid that will make this post appear too long. Here is the conclusion of the speech, which is my favorite part. I encourage you to read the whole thing, if you have time. Bear in mind that Mitchell was speaking to aspiring writers:

I am talking here of course of the kind of writing that I do. I don't write fiction, I don't know how to write fiction; I don't make characters, I don't know how to make characters; I don't have plots, I don't know how to make plots--all I do is try to think on the page--but I have read numbers of the works of those who makes plots, and write fiction, and know how to do that, and there is no difference. There is no difference there whatsoever. They make, insofar as they can, the truth. They make true human beings, who in true human predicaments, seek the truth for themselves. They make there all of the agony and joy, both, that it is to be a human being, coming into self-knowledge or suffering in its lack. As a matter of fact they make it far better than any discursive writer -- like this one -- can do, and they make it in drama, and they make it in lit, and they make it in living before our eyes, and it is the search for truth ... and whether or not you know, the difference between a good book and a bad book, I don't know -- and I don't know the difference between a good book and a bad book -- but you do know the difference between a true book and a false book. That is the real distinction. And if you will think about it a false book is whoring, or a false book is parroting; or a false book is a book in which the author -- I loved what you said about this this morning, Jane -- you write for yourself. And it goes further: I think you write because of yourself. It is you who are illuminated by what you write; and what is the nature of that illumination? It has one simple name -- although the terms underneath the name are numerous and complicated -- and that is self-knowledge ...

Now, if you take up writing seriously, I can't promise this, but I can hope this: I hope that it will make you profoundly unhappy. I hope that every day will bring you some bad news from the frontier of that unknown territory in which you work. I hope every day you rise up from your desk and say, "God, what a fool I was yesterday!" So that you can say that again tomorrow. And thus write against your life.  

There was a very popular whoring book around lately -- I don't know, it hasn't been for some time, I can't remember when, it was called "I'm Okay" -- uh, something -- "I'm Okay, You're Okay." Oh, what pleasant news. Believe me, you'll never lose money by telling people how nice they are. You'll never lose money by telling people, "Hey! Don't worry about your miserable rotten behavior and your perversions, and your lies, and your thefts! You're okay!" No one will blame you for this, and you may actually do quite well. I don't know about you -- I suspect, but I don't know about you -- however I will tell you this: I am not okay. I am not okay. I do not carefully define my terms when I think. I do not test, rigidly, as though I were a stranger, every one of my quaint and curious notions, prejudices, and beliefs, I do not do this, I am not okay. I lie. Whether I lie to you is none of your damn business; I lie to me, as to what I am and how it is in me. And I am not okay. (And I don't think you're okay either, but all I can do is suspect that.)  

Okayness does not ever come; I'm sure of that. But writing is the path towards it, and it's a path that hurts.  

The main point of the gift of Prometheus (i.e. the gift of mind), I think, is this. He made of us, with that gift -- by the way I'm a literal fundamentalist where the myth of Prometheus is concerned, you'll understand -- but by that gift, he made us absolutely unique in the universe, as far as we know. Before, all blindly floundering on, which is roughly as Aeschylus puts it, we were like the zebras, or the gnus (it's always good to mention the gnus): When bumped from the left, we veered to the right. And when bumped from the right, we veered to the left. We responded, perhaps very successfully as the zebras and the gnus do, matter of fact; but in a sense we lived what I think of as a satellite life. We lived, really, like moons. The moon ... shines. But not of herself. The moon is beautiful, but her beauty is provided for us by another power, the sun. The sun ... the sun does the sun. We do not see the sun by reflected light, we see the sun by its own light, and the day after Prometheus gave us that gift we who were satellites, creatures like others, entirely -- flowing -- where influence came, we became a new creature, something entirely different, all of us. You, you, you did. From having been a moon, you became a sun. The energy is in you. It starts in here. It has its home, its dwelling place, in here. Not in the world. Not in society. Not in your family. Not in your political party. Not in your church -- here is the life, and here is the light. Who of us knows that light? And who of us knows much about it? Damn few.  

Any serious work that a human being does must be looking for this light. And if you don't find this light, you will be able to write, and to be a writer -- either as a parrot or a whore, of course. But you'll never find the truth. Perhaps you'll never miss it, as a matter of fact I think the worst of them don't. But you will miss it. Because I am telling you this. I am a very arrogant schoolteacher; when people sit before me as though they are students, I imagine that they want to hear what I have to say and so I tell them what I have to say, and I tell them that because I have told you this, now you must be different, or deliberately reject some light. Go ahead and do that, if you will. But if you do pursue it, if you take this step from unknowing into knowing, you do walk a dangerous, perhaps even a deadly path; but it's the only path. I encourage no one to do this. But those of you who do it, and will do it, I will tell you this -- and I will tell you this as a command, because you can walk out now before you hear this command, but I'm going to give you this command:  

Don't -- shine.  

Don't seek to shine.  

Burn.

Wow! The first time I read this, I felt like Mitchell was speaking directly to me. He made me realize why I am driven to write: I write to know myself. I write because writing allows me to get my beliefs, values, and feelings out there, on paper (or a screen), at arm's length, so that I can examine them and get to know who I am - and by doing this, become a better person. 

Seneca

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that I used to be obsessed with tracking the number of readers I had, and that this obsession gradually wore off. Somewhere along the way I came across a quotation from Seneca in Letter #7 which explained to me why I became less focused on the number of readers:

Equally good is the answer given by the person, whoever it was (his identity is uncertain), who when asked what was the object of all the trouble he took over a piece of craftsmanship when it would never reach more than a very few people, replied: “A few is enough for me; so is one; and so is none.”

The more I have developed as a writer, the more this statement has resonated with me. All of the writing-motives I've listed here - Stafford's, Mitchell's, and in my case, even Orwell's - are selfish motives. I write primarily for myself, and although there is more potential for constructive criticism when more readers read by writing, the act of writing is something I do by myself, and for myself. Thus, even if nobody reads what I have written - and believe me, I've labored for hours on posts which have never seen the light of day - then the effort was still worthwhile for all of the aforementioned reasons. 

Conclusion

I laughed just now because I know that this is one of the blog posts I write which will get fewer readers than average ... and I really don't care! And that makes me happy! 

Here I have outlined three of my reasons for writing, at this stage of my life. Moreover, my writing of these three reasons is in line with these three reasons. This post was written to make a point about writing (political), and to help me clarify my thoughts about writing (discovery), and to help me come to terms with why I write (self-knowledge). 

That, to my mind, makes this a successful blog post. And with all due respect to my readers, my mind matters to me the most. :)

Yom ha'Kippurim 5777: On Being Human

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Artwork: (Unknown Zendikar Art)

Yom ha'Kippurim 5777: On Being Human

There is a passage from Richard Mitchell's The Gift of Fire that I think about going into Yom ha'Kippurim. Here is the excerpt in its entirety:

Chapter 1: "Who is Socrates, now that we need him?" 

I imagine some well-informed and largely wise visitor from another world who comes to Earth to study us. He begins by choosing two people at random, and, since time and place are of no importance to him, but only the single fact of humanity, he chooses Socrates and me, leaving aside for the moment every other human being. He begins with an understanding of the single but tremendous attribute that distinguishes us both from all other creatures of Earth. We are capable of Reason. Capable. We can know ourselves, unlike the foxes and the oaks, and can know that we know ourselves. He knows that while we have appetites and urges just like all the other creatures, we have the astonishing power of seeing them not simply as the necessary attributes of what we are, but as separate from us in a strange way, so that we can hold them at arm's length, turning them this way and that, and make judgment of them, and even put them aside, saying, Yes, that is "me," in a way, but, when I choose, it is just a thing, not truly me, but only mine. He sees, in short, what "human" means in "human beings."

And then he considers the specimens he has chosen, Socrates and me. He measures that degree to which they conform to what "human" means in "human beings." With those superior extraterrestrial powers that imagination grants him, he will easily discover:

That I have notions, certain "sayings" in my mind, that flatly contradict one another; believing, for instance, that I can choose for myself the path of my life while blaming other people for the difficulty of the path. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That my mind is full of ideas that are truly nothing more than words, and that as to the meaning of the words I have no clear and constant idea, behaving today as though "justice" were one thing, and tomorrow as though it were another. That, while wanting to be happy and good, I have no clear ideas by which I might distinguish, or might even want to distinguish, happiness from pleasure, and goodness from social acceptability. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I usually believe what I believe not because I have tested and found it coherent and consistent, and harmonious with evidence, but because it is also believed by the right people, people like me, and because it pleases me. And that furthermore, I live and act and speak as though my believing were no different from my knowing. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I put myself forth as one who can direct and govern the minds, the inner lives, of others, that, in fact, I make my living as one who can do that, but that my own actions are governed, more often than not, by desire or whim. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to have a great need for things, and think myself somehow treated unjustly by an insufficiency of them, and that this insufficiency, which seems strangely to persist even after I get hold of the thing whose necessity I have most recently noted, prevents in me that cheerful and temperate disposition to which I deem myself entitled. With Socrates, this is not the case.

That I seem to know what I want, but that I have no way of figuring out whether I should want what I want, and that, indeed, it does not occur to me that I should be able to figure that out. With Socrates, this is not the case.

And that, in short and in general, my mind, the thing that most makes us human, is not doing the steering of this life, but is usually being hustled along on a wild ride by the disorderly and conflicting commands of whole hosts of notions, appetites, hopes, and fears. With Socrates, this is not the case.

How could the alien enquirer help concluding that there is something "wrong" with me, and that the humanness that is indeed in me has been somehow "broken," which he can clearly see by comparing me with Socrates? Must he not decide that Socrates is the normal human, and I the freak, the distortion of human nature?

When he pronounces me the freak, and Socrates the perfectly ordinary, normal human being, living quite obviously, as perhaps only an "alien" can see, by the power of that which most makes a human a human, shall I defend myself by appeal to the principle of majority rule? Shall I say: Well, after all, Socrates is only one human being, and all the others are more like me. Would I not prove myself all the more the freak by my dependence on such a preposterously irrelevant principle? If that visitor were rude, he might well point out that my ability to see, on the one hand, what is natural to human beings, and to claim, on the other, that its absence is only natural, and thus normal, is just the sort of reasoning that he would expect of a freak, whose very freakishness is seen in his inability to do what is simply natural to his species -- that is, to make sense.

But Socrates would defend me. He would say, for this he said very often:

No, my young friend is not truly a freak. All that I can do, he can do; he just doesn't do it. And if he doesn't do it, it is because of something else that is natural to human beings, and just as human as the powers that you rightly find human in me. Before we awaken, we must sleep, and some of us sleep deeper and longer than others. It may be, that unless we are awakened by some help from other human beings, we sleep our lives away, and never come into those powers. But we can be awakened.

In that respect, my friend is not a freak. He might better be thought a sleepwalker, moving about in the world, and getting all sorts of things done, often on time, and sometimes very effectively indeed. But the very power of routine habit by which he can do all that has become the only government that he knows. And the voices of his desires are loud. He is just now not in a condition to give his full attention to any meaning that might be found in all that he does, or to consider carefully how to distinguish between the better and the worse. He might be thought a child, and a perfectly natural child, who lives still in that curious, glorious haze of youth, when only desire seems worthy of obedience, and when the mighty fact of the world that is so very "there" looms immeasurably larger than the fact of the self that is in that world. He might grow up, and it is the "mightness" in him that makes him truly human, however he may look like a freak just now. From time to time, we are all just such freaks, and mindless, for mindlessness is the great background of noise out of which some few certain sounds can be brought forth and harmonized as music.

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Although Mitchell's words stand on their own, I find that I associate them to a statement from Chazal, which the Rambam brings down in Hilchos Beis ha'Bechirah 2:2:

There is a unanimous tradition that the place on which David and Shlomo built the Altar, the threshing floor of Arnan, is the location where Abraham built the Altar on which he prepared Yitzchak for sacrifice. Noach built [an altar] on that location when he left the ark. It was also [the place] of the Altar on which Kayin and Hevel brought sacrifices.[Similarly,] Adam, the first man, offered a sacrifice there and was created at that very spot, as our Sages said: "Man was created from the place of his atonement" ("Adam mi'makom kaparaso nivra").

Cheit (sin) is unavoidable. Shlomo ha'Melech said: "There is no [entirely] righteous man on earth who does [only] good and does not sin" (Koheles 7:20). Alexander Pope said: "To err is human." However, even though it is natural to sin, this doesn't mean that to sin is our nature.

This, I believe, is what Mitchell was getting at, and what Chazal were alluding to when they said that man was created from the place of his kaparah. Judaism does not entertain fanciful notions of "saints." The cycles of cheit and teshuvah, avon and kaparah, regression and development, are part of what it means to be human. Our struggle to overcome our natural inclinations to live in line with our true nature is by design.

In this sense, it is a mistake to view cheit as an utter failure. Instead, cheit should be viewed as an opportunity for self-knowledge and development. I believe that this shift in our perspective of cheit is essential in order to have a Yom ha'Kippurim that is a "fresh start" day of growth rather than a "dead end" day of guilt and self-castigation.

"I am only human." This argument is, at the same time, our greatest defense, but also our greatest liability - depending on what we mean when we invoke it. And what better time to contemplate that meaning than Yom ha'Kippurim, when we stand before the Creator and beseech Him to help us live as He designed us to live.

May we all attain kaparah this Yom ha'Kippurim and arrive at a truer relationship with our own humanity.

Richard Mitchell: On Knowing vs. Knowing About

Last week's post from Richard Mitchell's The Gift of Fire reminded me of another of my many favorite ideas from that book. This one is from Mitchell's introduction. Since his introduction is so short and rich with ideas, I have decided to post the entire thing. I would like to call special attention to the three passages I've emphasized in bold towards the end. 

Originally posted in June, 2009.

Artwork: Ancestral Recall, by Ryan Pancoast

Richard Mitchell: On Knowing vs. Knowing About

- Introduction to The Gift of Fire

I SUSPECT THAT THOSE WHO have read some of my other works will be a little surprised by this one. I am a little surprised by this one.

That, in itself, is nothing new. I have never yet written anything, long or short, that did not surprise me. That is, for me at least, the greatest worth of writing, which is only incidentally a way of telling others what you think. Its first use is for the making of what you think, for the discovery of understanding, an act that happens only in language.

I have habitually found it convenient, and perhaps just a little too easy, to look for understanding by paying close attention to failures of understanding, which always take the form of bad language. Just as there is nothing but language in which to make sense, there is nothing but language in which to make nonsense. So, in my works, at least, the examination of sense and nonsense has ordinarily been a sometimes clever and amusing castigation of fools, who can be shown to imagine that they make sense when they don't.

The castigation of fools is, of course, an ancient and honorable task of writers and, unless very poorly done, an enterprise that will usually entertain those who behold it. No matter what else we imagine that we believe about the propriety of compassion for the unfortunate, we do like to see fools exposed. It's funny. And it is not only funny; it is the great theme of Comedy, and a mild, domestic counterpart of the great theme of Tragedy, in which we rejoice, however sadly, to see villains brought down.

So it is that the habitual contemplation of folly, which does not seem to be the worst thing in the world, leads little by little to some consideration of vice, which does seem to be the worst thing in the world. It is troubling to notice that when we are foolish or "only foolish," as we easily deem it, we find ourselves all the more likely to do bad things. And when we can see, as I think I have so often managed to demonstrate, that some very foolish people are in a position to bring the consequences of their folly not only on themselves but on others, we do have the suspicion that something bad is going on. Surely, if we could certainly pronounce certain persons wise, we would think it a good thing to fall under their influence, and it seems only natural and inescapably right to expect some badness from the influence of fools. So it was that I gradually found, in my own considerations of nonsense, less play and more brooding, less glee and more melancholy, and the growing conviction that the silly mind, just as much as the wicked mind, if there is such a thing, makes bad things happen. And my meditations on foolish language, my own included, grew somber and satirical.

Satire is a cunning, landless opportunist who poaches along the borders of the two great realms of Tragedy and Comedy. The hunting is good, no doubt, for the satirist is nourished by folly and vice, of which there is said to be never any shortage. But, perhaps because I was reared in Comedy's fair land, I am not convinced of that. Folly is thick on the ground, no doubt, but where is vice? I know, I truly do know and can demonstrate, just as surely as one can provide a proof in geometry, that certain influential persons, especially in the schools, do bad things to other people. But they are not villains. They do not will badness. On the contrary, probably far more than most of us, they deliberately intend to do good things. And I am certain that they would do good things, if only they could make sense.

But all of that, obviously, could be said of any one of us. Outside of the pages of fantastic fiction, there is no one who says in the heart, I will do evil. We all intend the good, and would, at least often, do it if we could. But we don't always understand what the good is.

That is hardly a new idea. But, while I have known about it for a long time, heard it with the hearing of the ear, as it were, I haven't truly known it. Between those conditions -- knowing about, and knowing -- I think there is a very big difference. The point of this book was, for me, the discovery of that understanding. True education is not knowing about, but knowing. It is the cure of folly and the curb of vice, and our only hope of escaping what Socrates once called "the greatest peril of this our life" -- not sickness or death, as most of us would say, but the failure to make sense about the better and the worse, and thus to choose the wrong one, thinking it the other.

This is, I'm afraid, a presumptuous book. It is a book about how to live by a man who doesn't know how to live, but who has begun to learn that he doesn't know how.

Richard Mitchell: The Land of We All

After the terrible slew of shootings last week, I saw many statements on social media saying things like "What have we become?" and "Why are we allowing this to happen?" This chapter from Richard Mitchell's The Gift of Fire kept on coming to mind. I think it expresses a truth that needs to be remembered. Since Mitchell is far better with words than I am, I have decided to post the chapter in its entirety. The entire book is available for free here: http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/gift-of-fire/

Artwork: Hive Mind, by Steve Argyle

Richard Mitchell: The Land of We All

- Chapter 3 of The Gift of Fire

ONE OF THE FIRST FACTS about thinking seems too obvious to be worth mentioning, but, it isn't always obvious, and we often behave as though it weren't a fact. Only a person can think. I don't mean by that to point out that trees and rocks can't think, but to say, rather, that even if trees and rocks could think, only a tree or a rock could think. Thinking can not be done corporately. Nations and committees can't think. That is not only because they have no brains, but because they have no selves, no centers, no souls, if you like. Millions and millions of persons may hold the same thought, or conviction or suspicion, but each and every person of those millions must hold it all alone. And that it truly is the same thought in all of them, the very same thought, each must guess of all the others, for into each other's minds we can not get. All I can ever know of what you think is your testimony, which may well be as inexpert or self-interested as mine often is. Every thinker is unique, since every person is unique.

From a certain point of view, thinking is preposterous behavior, and astonishing. If its appearance among us is truly the result of some evolutionary "save-the-species" development, it is clearly one of Nature's great mistakes, for it, and it alone, has made of us the only species not only able to destroy itself, but very likely to destroy itself. Of course, I might have that wrong if it is really in Nature's great plan to save all the other species by planting in the most dangerous one a lethal seed, but that requires in Nature a low cunning which seems beneath her. In any case, however, it is perfectly clear that other creatures do very well indeed without thinking, without seeking the meaning of their deeds, without making and testing propositions, and without reading or writing. All such acts, and countless related ones, from the point of view of all the rest of the universe that we know of, must be accounted nothing but "unnatural."

In thinking about thinking, and in thinking about anything, for that matter, it is always useful to think about something else instead. Give some thought to the playing of the violin. Imagine that some great team of skilled researchers has given itself to, and at last accomplished, a study of violin-playing, a detailed and comprehensive description of absolutely everything that is happening in a human being who is playing the violin. Their work has been tremendous, and their findings occupy a whole shelf, maybe a whole wing, for their considerations begin at least at the submolecular level of neural signals, and reach, at the far end of some unimaginably long line, all those things that we vaguely point to when we talk about the imagination and understanding of the artist. And all such things the researchers have weighed and measure and counted.

Imagine now the immensely distant future, when we have ceased on the Earth, and when there are no singers, no songs, and no violin-playing. Visitors from another world arrive, and find some few remnants, among them, the great exhaustive study of violin-playing, complete with pictures and charts and tables of figures, to say nothing of ear-witness accounts of the feat itself. Will they not be astonished and reach pretty much the same conclusion that even you and I would reach should we be able to read such a study? Will they not say: This is too much. Any fool can see that the playing of the violin is simply impossible.

When such a task is seen in all of its details, it takes on the look not only of the impossible, but even of the unnatural. To one who considers all of the great and harmonious workings of Nature, the deep and continual principles that inform them, all that might be called not only Order but even The Order, nothing could seem more contrary and unlikely than that a person should bring forth ravishing beauty from a dinky wooden box.

But in fact, as anyone can see, that is only one of countless unlikely things that persons do. And thinking is another such. If the great study of violin-playing would fill a whole wing, the great study of thinking would need a few libraries all to itself. But it can be done. And--an even more startling fact--it can be done by a person who can also play the violin.

Playing the violin or writing a poem are special ways of paying attention. They are acts at once small and great. Although only one person can commit them, they require orderly marshallings of countless and diverse forces, something like the great landing of armies in Normandy, but incalculably bigger and more complicated. And such a comparison leads to another important clue in thinking about thinking. Playing the violin, and thinking, and landing in Normandy are indubitably human accomplishments, for better or worse, in either case. But they are accomplishments very different in nature, for while human beings, and only human beings, can achieve them all, only an individual person can achieve the playing and the thinking, both of which are the more difficult, and complicated, and unlikely. The great study of the invasion can in fact be written, and even read. It was. But the great study of violin-playing will never be done.

It is an obvious but simple distinction--though rarely made--that there are some things that we can do because we are humanity, and some things that we can do because we are persons, and that there is some radical and absolute difference between the two classes of things. They do not overlap. A person can no more invade Normandy than an army can play the violin. Furthermore, while the deeds that pertain to humanity are frequently very large and very visible, so that we can all see just how stupendous they are, and the deeds that pertain to persons seem very small and are often utterly invisible; it takes only a little redirection to conclude that the latter are far greater accomplishments than the former, beggaring description and final analysis, and, at last, unlikely.

But the deeds of humanity are given, in our minds, a superiority over the deeds of persons. By contrast with the waging of war, the playing of the violin seems immensely less important, a trifle, in fact. It is an interesting opinion, for its validity depends entirely on what meaning we are to take from the word "important." It isn't true, of course, that Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and I don't know what meaning I would take from the fact if he had, but if Oistrakh had fiddled through the siege of Leningrad, as Dame Myra played Mozart through the Blitz, I would see a person doing one sort of thing and humanity doing another sort of thing, and I would wonder about what I might learn to mean by the word important.

About this I don't have to wonder: Dame Myra, or Oistrakh, or perhaps even Nero, for all I know, could also have wondered about what they might mean by the word important, but humanity could not. Humanity does not wonder. Only a person can wonder. And the list is very long of verbs that can be added to the words "Only a person... ." If you will make yourself such a list of verbs, and then another of the verbs that go with "Only humanity can..." you will discover a lot of things to wonder about, and one of the more important ones will be the meaning that you might learn to assign to the word important.

While it may well be that few persons ever happen to notice and consider the strange and unique powers that they have as persons, and not as humanity, including the power to decide what important should mean, I suspect that we all have some inkling of that strange state of affairs. That is why we are warned in schools--well, maybe in some schools--against what is generally called "generalization." Generalizations often name many minds and then go on to speak as though they were a mind. Right from the start, they speak of what is not, for the Italians can not believe one thing and the Belgians another. Only a person can believe or think--or feel, for that matter. And when we undertake to talk about what is not, we are in danger of falling into nonsense and talking rubbish.

But the warning against generalization is ordinarily provided not for intellectual reasons but for social reasons. It is certainly true that vague generalization provides an easy way to insult lots of people all at once without having to prove anything, but it also provides an easy way to praise or flatter lots of people all at once without having to prove anything. If I say that Jews are stingy, I will be accused first of some social depravity, and only thereafter, and rarely, too, of intellectual disorder. Furthermore, my intellectual disorder, speaking as though Jews were an agent who could be stingy, will be at least partially excused should I back off a bit and say, to what will surely be general assent, Well, some Jews are stingy. Who can deny it? Some Eskimos are also stingy. I will not be required to specify a percentage.

Having corrected myself socially, I will not be required to correct myself intellectually. And I will suffer no correction at all if I say that Jews are diligent and productive. Now, I am OK, and listeners will nod approvingly. Nor will I be required to say, even approximately, how many Jews are diligent and productive, or which ones.

In one of the worlds in which I live, the World of We All, the first assertion is a Bad Thing, and the second a Good Thing. But in another world in which I also live, the world where the mind does its work, the two statements are perfectly equal in value, and their value is zero. They are worthless statements. It is not sufficient to condemn them as generalizations, for that condemnation is really an exoneration as well. The most we require of a generalization is that it be toned down. Come on, now, they can't all be stingy. And when we declaw our generalizations, we suppose that we have come out of the Wrong and into the Right. But we have only come out of one worthlessness and into another.

There are several ways by which to detect a worthless statement. One of them is making it into its opposite, and considering the statement and its supposed negation side by side. The opposite of a worthless statement is always worthless. If we test the proposition that fat men are jolly by asserting also that fat men are morose, we do not notice that light has been shed on the ordinarily expectable disposition of fat men. Neither proposition suggests any possibility of verification or of falsification. We can not ask, If the first were true, what else would be true? We can not look for evidence for the support of the one or the other, because we can not find, in the world, the real subject of either sentence, as we could if the subject were something like a cannonball dropped from a leaning tower, or a certain fat man well known to us. We can not find "fat men." At what weight will we set our definition? Will we omit some men who fall short by three ounces? Will we include those who were three ounces too skinny in the morning but somehow manage to satisfy us as fat after lunch? And what will we do about jolly, and morose? Or stingy and productive, for that matter? Where will we set their limits? How closely will we be able to measure them?

Worthless statements can thus be understood as propositions that we simply can not use for thinking. They just don't work. It is not because they are mysteries or concepts that transcend thought, like the nature and substance of the Holy Ghost, or circularity in the absence of circles, but because they do not rise to the level of thought, in which we find that we need to make meaningful statements about meaningful statements.

Worthless statements are a kind of social grace, except, of course, when they are a social disgrace. They have, in the work of the mind, the same value as, Well, it's good to see you. How have you been? But, at their worst, which is where they usually roost, they are dangerous deceptions of the mind. They leave us, if we are not attentive, with the vague impression that we know something, when we don't, thus providing us with the chance of going on to suppose that we know something else as a consequence of something that we don't know. No good is likely to come of that, except by the happiest accident, and for harm to come of it requires no accident at all. This is especially true in that part of life which is social, for it is exactly there, where great masses of people are made into the subjects of propositions, that the worthless statement most flourishes, with predictable consequences.

I have been reading, over and over for a few years now, a piece I tore out of a newspaper. It is a quotation from a book, and it was printed alongside a review of the book, as an example of good work. The reviewer did not like the book. The author seems to be a decent and energetic woman who gave up a successful career as a physician to devote herself to what is perhaps an even higher calling. She is dismayed, as I am too, by the prospect, perhaps the likelihood, of an unimaginably destructive nuclear war. She now devotes her life to arousing others to the danger of the threat, and the book in question is part of her work to that end.

I am on her side. I suspect that I would like her. She is, in principle, saying a very fine thing: Come, let us reason together. This represents exactly that sort of education I think is the only true one, an education in Reason--that work of the mind by which we can, if it can be known, know the Good. And know the evil too, and see it for what it is, and turn away from it. If we can not save ourselves from nuclear destruction by the work of the mind, then our future will be just a matter of luck, and where war is concerned, we seem little likely to be lucky. But if it is the work of the mind that will save us, then the work of the mind badly done will destroy us, unless, again, we are lucky. Read now what she says and consider whether the mind's work in this case be done well or ill:

It is true that we have the secret of atomic energy locked in our brains forever. But this does not mean that we can't alter our behavior. Once we practiced slavery, cannibalism, and dueling; as we became more civilized, we learned that these forms of behavior were antithetical to society, so we stopped. Similarly, we can easily stop making nuclear weapons, and we can also stop fighting and killing each other.

In trying to keep your mind clear, it is always a good idea to be on the lookout for the pronoun "we." If "fat men" make up a category too big and shapeless for us to say anything accurate about, we is clearly much larger, and, unfortunately, not at all shapeless. Except where some defined context limits it to exactly these or those of us, we has to be all of us. Every one. And people who make moral propositions have a way of talking about we, and making thus the same kind of worthless statement that I can make by talking about fat men.

And, because we is everybody, it is nobody. It is simply not a person, not a center of consciousness that can think and feel and do, and is therefore capable of no one of those acts named by the verbs that go with the statement "Only a person can..."

I am a bona fide member of we. So are you. About you I can not speak, but for myself I can say, and not at all to my shame, that I have never given up slavery. I have never even dreamed of it. If you are depending, for the sake of the survival of our species, on the fact that I have learned to alter my behavior and have thus forsworn slavery, then you are leaning on a weak reed, and the future of our species is not bright. Nor do I suspect for a minute that I am just one of the die-hards, still holding fast to the practice of slavery when almost everyone else has learned better. I rather suspect that, among we, there are actually billions like me, who have never given up slavery, having had, like me, no reason to do so, having never, just like me, practiced it in the first place. I suspect, furthermore, and the history of an especially bloody war leads me to that suspicion, that many who did give up slavery, did it not out of some moral reawakening, but under duress--that is to say, not as a result of what a person can do, but as a result of what humanity can do. Their giving up was an outer event, and not an inner act. And I have to wonder about the author of that passage. Did she have some inner reason to give up slavery? And did she proceed, by a conscious and supremely important act of the will, to give it up?

If we now look around at all of our species, and flatter ourselves as persons who have learned at least enough goodness to grant our slaves their freedom, we say what is not so. Somewhere in North Africa or the deep jungles of Borneo, it may be possible to find a chieftain or two who has in fact done exactly that, but I think it unlikely that we can depend on them to save us from war.

I will have to say the same about dueling and cannibalism. I have never given them up. In those respects, I am not the better person implied in that we. And there is very probably hardly anyone who is. Where will we find all of those people who, having learned better how to order society and become better persons, will now be the better persons who stop fighting and killing each other?

Any proposition has two sides. It always says, in its simplest form, that A is B. The A of those propositions simply doesn't exist. There surely have been people who did once give up those wicked practices, but they are gone from us. Could they hear us boasting that we made those decisions, they might be a bit put out. Perlman might do little more than raise an eyebrow if I were to claim that we had learned to play the violin, but the heroes of Marathon might actually turn nasty if I were to boast that we found on that little beach the strength and determination to turn back the stronger force of tyranny. The B's of those propositions, however, do indeed exist. And, if we can understand them not just by their titles but by their principles, it may become clear that practically no one has ever given them up.

Here is another way in which our language can trick us into imagining that we are thinking. The names of things are not the things, and we have many names that point to no things at all, but to ideas. What is slavery? In one sense, it is easily identified. Where one person is allowed to have, by law, possession of another person, ownership, with all the rights that traditionally go with ownership, that is slavery. In our own nation, that law was changed, but not by those who owned the slaves. As to whether those who made the change sought the moral betterment of those who resisted it, or something else, there is at least room for speculation.

But what is the root of slavery? What is it in principle, rather than in detail? How did such a practice come to be established by humanity, and, apparently, universally established at that? Here, there is room for both speculation and introspection. Which of us can say that he has never used another person as though that person were an object? Which of us has resisted every impulse to control or govern another? Which of us has never deemed himself better and more valuable than another? Which of us has never sought to put some fence around the mind of another? Is there one of us who has not thought what even Plato thought, that there are certain people who are--well, just inferior, by nature, just not capable of living under their own direction, and that we are actually doing them a favor by directing their lives for them, in some way or another?

I will plead guilty to all of those charges, and I would be very eager to meet a person who is innocent of them all, for then I might best study Goodness. But, thinking not in terms of laws and social conventions, which are always changing, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Goodness, but only with Necessity, I will have to admit again, but for a very different reason, that I have not given up slavery, for indeed, I still practice it.

I can be very specific about that. I can, and do, so overpower the minds of my students, those, at least, who want to pay attention, and who have little defense, that they come to believe what I seem to believe, to judge as I judge. When that happens, I have to start contradicting myself, and pointing to the uncertainties of my own reasoning, until they too come around to the new course, and the process begins again. Is the root of slavery not in them as well as in me? Who of us has not sought to be led? Which of us has not, from time to time, abandoned the difficult task of understanding for ourselves, of governing ourselves, even of supporting ourselves? Which of us has not wanted a master, so that we might be as well taken care of as a puppy, fed and watered and cleaned up after? Why is it that my students, when they come to be entirely of my mind, think that that is what they are supposed to do? What taught them that, if not some cultivation and even some encouragement in them of whatever it is in us all that fears the perils of freedom? And the cultivators and encouragers, or even the permitters--have they given up slavery?

Nor have I given up dueling. I still duel. I still seek to avenge my "honor." I still incline to answer fire with fire, and injustice, whatever I mean by that, with justice, whatever I mean by that. That I do not go out at dawn with pistols is not enough to save me from the name of duelist.

On cannibalism, I will make a small concession. While I never did give it up, I have also never knowingly practiced it. It is, in any case, not at all the same sort of "crime" or "depravity" as slavery or dueling, or even as fighting and killing, not rooted in what may well be some permanent and universal facts about human beings. We do know that it was usually practiced only as a religious ritual, and we also know that our supposed innate abhorrence of cannibalism disappears quite readily under the clear and imminent threat of starvation, as survivors of airplane crashes in the high mountains will testify. But cannibalism, too, might well have been "given up" by some person or persons who did indeed come into some new moral understanding. Where are they now? What role will they have to play in the moral reawakening by which we will all escape the coming storm?

If you were to ask the next three persons you meet in the street to give a few reasons for the fact that so many people seem unable to think coherently, consistently, and logically, you would hear some obvious answers. Some of those answers would refer to what is called "intelligence." Well, some people are just smarter than others, and thus naturally capable of more and better thought. You would hear answers about something called "judgment," and very likely accompanied by the complaint that the schools just don't teach judgment anymore, as though they always had, of course, in the good old days when everyone was consistently able to think coherently. Your most sophisticated informant might well point to the notorious difficulty of strict and formal logic, which the schools also don't teach anymore. After all, are there not dozens and dozens of those syllogisms, each with a name of its own, and each indispensable to clear and correct thought? Just think of all those famous fallacies, and how easily the untrained mind will stumble into them. And then, of course, there is ignorance, in this context to be strictly construed not as dullness of mind, but as the simple absence of information, and thus a widespread impediment to clear thinking even in the smartest. And just think how much information there is! Who could have it all, or even any considerable share of it?

There is some usefulness in all of those understandings, but they seem to me quite unable to explain the thinking we have been considering here. The author of those thoughts on slavery remains, whether she practices or not, a skillful physician. She must indeed be what we call "smart," and diligent as well. Her profession requires logical thought, and lots of it, and the drawing of correct inferences from the evidence of knowable facts, a process which must be granted the rank of judgment. I would put the care of my body under her supervision with no misgivings at all, knowing that where she had knowledge she would act effectively, and that where she had not enough knowledge, she would know that she had not enough knowledge, and send me to someone who did.

Nor would I say, of the thoughts we have been thinking about, that she has wandered "out of her field." There are some people who do put themselves forth as experts in the mysteries of the human heart and soul--all sorts, from psychiatrists and economists to preachers and politicians--but those mysteries are, and in fact should be, everybody's field. Who are you, who am I, who is anybody, to be disqualified as to that inquiry? If there is any special expertise to be had in contemplating human mysteries and speaking what truth can be had about them, it might be in our poets and dramatists and novelists, or even in our myths and music, but who surely knows which? No, we are not dealing here with someone who is just out of her depth in a highly technical subject. The impediments to her clear thinking are not to be found in any of the answers given above. They come from pains in her belly.

The Greeks supposed that the belly was the nursery and dwelling place of the appetites and desires, just as they supposed that the head was the home of thought, and the chest the place of right feelings, a reasonable mediation between the two. Their knowledge of anatomy would not have gotten them through our medical schools, but their metaphor provides powers of the mind that are not instilled in our medical schools, or any other. That metaphor has this great virtue, that it gives us the beginning of a way to distinguish internal and invisible events from one another by family, as it were. We can be almost as clear in our minds about the different denizens of the belly, the chest, and the head, as we can about animals, vegetables, and minerals.

(I am thinking just now, as many readers may know, about a long essay by C. S. Lewis, "Men Without Chests." It is about what seems to Lewis a general and growing inability either to dethrone or harmonize technical information or prowess and gut feelings. It is good to read. Once a year.)

Consider again that, even in the company of those we call "intellectuals," I would suffer rebuke or disapproval in saying that Jews are stingy, and escape both in saying that Jews are diligent and productive. As thinking, both statements are equal. Both worthless. If I can get away with the second, even in lofty mental company, it is because what I say probably makes every belly in the room purr with satisfaction, while the first makes them all growl with unease.

Of course, it may be a bit more complicated than that. Some belly may be in spasm, truly pleased to hear Jews called stingy, but fearful lest its owner be revealed as bigoted. That owner will very likely permit his belly its secret pleasure and send his head forth to do a little socially acceptable lying. I will still get the rebuke and disapproval. To escape it, and thus get away with an utterly worthless proposition, all I have to do is make the bellies purr. Lots of people know that secret, and live very well by it indeed.

The passage cited earlier will make many bellies purr. There are probably very few people who are looking forward to nuclear war, and thus anxious about all the rest of us who are hoping to find some way to prevent it. Who but a maniac out of an old-fashioned science-fiction novel would contemplate with glee the destruction of all life, or even of lots of it? Who would not lament the destruction of the butterflies, which is actually, and just a little bit unfortunately, one of the hideous possibilities used by the author in her "argument"?

But if it is by reasoning together that we may escape nuclear war, then her thinking may kill us all. In that marvelously pliable land of we all, anybody can get away with anything. Her opponents, and there must be some, for otherwise there could be no threat, can write books claiming that we have learned, through bitter lessons, that force succumbs only to force, and that we have thus given up, or certainly should give up, our childish dreams of perpetual peace. Just as cogently as she, which is to say, not at all, but with just as much hope of making bellies purr, others can say that we have learned that the price of freedom is supreme sacrifice, and thus given up the belief, which might also be called "antithetical to civilization," that we can enjoy its fruits without paying its costs.

There is lots of talk these days about "teaching children to think," a presumed function of the schools, which they are either executing well or ill, depending on which expert speaks. Of what can that teaching of thinking consist, I wonder. What exercises can be done? Are the answers in the back of the book, or only in the teachers' manual? What would I do, if I had to teach children to think?

The first thing I would do, I hope, would be to get out of the land of we all, and recognize that "children" do not constitute an entity capable of thought. So I would set out to discover how to teach a person to think. And, since the task seems formidable, I would prefer, for my first try at such work, to pick the person myself, one who shows some promise. And I would pick, of course, a person who says that we have given up slavery and dueling and cannibalism.

And where would I begin, with a person who is already, as we understand the term, not only "educated," but "highly educated"? With the belly, of course, which in this case has overpowered the head. The greatest failures of thinking do not come from any incapacities of the mind, nor are they prevented by great skills of the mind. They come from the interference emitted by the feelings, which can be both detected and disarmed by the one great power of thought that is the mother of all others, and that is self-knowledge, the beginning of all thoughtfulness.