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| Rising sun cutting through smoke from Bow Power Plant CC Jean Stimmell: 12/15/15 |
I wish to expand the conversation about writing, started by Nancy Steenson in her Concord Monitor column (12/16/20), warning us about how today’s students can’t express themselves in writing because they haven’t been taught how.
It doesn’t surprise me. I’d go further and hazard a guess that all of us, no matter what our age, have seen our writing skills deteriorate with the advent of computers., smartphones, and the whole digital age.
Ms. Steenson advocates returning to the old days when students learned what good writing was and practiced doing it. Indeed, back in the 1950s and 1960s, when I went to school, we wrote a lot and were drilled in grammar and punctuation, but it was an arduous task. While the practice that came from composing term papers and book reports helped organize my swirling thoughts, putting down words on the page was always an ordeal, like going to my childhood dentist who didn’t use novocaine.
That changed after I got back from Vietnam. It turned out that many of us returning veterans had problems with anger and acting out. More of us were dying from suicide than had from combat. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not yet a diagnosis, opening the door for a crescendo of news reports, labeling us as “crazy Vietnam vets.”
I stewed for days about this media feeding frenzy until finally, after a hard day of building stonewalls, I sat down at the kitchen table and started to write and write; I wrote all night. The result ended up becoming the cover story in the old New Hampshire Times.
That was my real introduction to writing. The subject matter commanded me to write because it was so personal and close to my heart. Writing has never been easy for me. I still need to be inspired by an idea and then, after much procrastination, force myself to sit down and write disjointed crap. Finally, if I’m blessed, I find a rhythm that overcomes my internal censor, allowing me to spit out what –although I wasn’t aware of it beforehand – I wanted to say.
Of course, in a real sense, it is not true that we no longer know how to write: We have all become experts with texts and Twitter.
The rub comes when we have to address complex issues. Essays can be an excellent tool but fell out of favor, as a consequence of what sociologists call modernity (or the modern age), which crested in the middle of last century: Modernity downplayed our subjective feelings and our ethical concerns, in favor of glorifying impersonal, objective reality.
During that time, science was next to godliness; we wholeheartedly supporting its quest to unravel the mystery of life while making life a breeze for all of us. A senate committee in the 1960s projected that as a result of improved technology, the American workweek would be reduced to 14 hours by 2000. And scientists predicted we would soon have unlimited atomic power “too cheap to meter.”
Democracy was so ascendant by the time the Berlin Wall fell that Francis Fukuyama, a prominent theorist, confidently predicted we had reached the end of history: “the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy.”1
Under these circumstances, the influence of personal essays withered, blinded by the allure of a single, dispassionate, all-knowing truth. Essayists were replaced by experts who pontificated about ultimate reality in grand treatises and scientific equations.
However, as we now know, the experts were wrong.
Rather than the whole world sailing off into the sunset in a single, blissful ark of shared reality, the opposite happened: a splintering of reality into multiple truths, depending on who you are and where you stand in society.
As a result, essays are regaining their clout. Rather than claiming objective truth – which is an illusion, according to many – they present individual perspectives, based on available evidence, specific to time and place.
They erase walls between subject and object, making no attempt to separate our inner feelings from the outside world. As Robert Musil observed: “Man and the world are together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man.”2
As such, an essay is not a formal proclamation but reflections based on personal experience. Fundamental to the essay, Alan Wall tells us, is “the notion of uncertainty, the endless seesawing possibilities of proof and disproof. An essay is a testing”3
The “my turn” columns in this newspaper are an excellent example of such works in progress. Each column is a valuable thread, in and of itself. But when woven together over time, they transform into a rich tapestry, illuminating the soul of our community.
Writing a column for the Monitor is a way to get back in the fray. It can help us discover our voices. It’s hard work, like going to the gym. But if we persevere, we can find clarity and catharsis.
And, shucks, all together we may change the world.
xxx
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1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
2 https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/essayistic-novel-and-mode-life-robert-musils-man-without-qualities
3 https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/05/wall-essayism-modernity/1
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