“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”
Alan Bennett, The History Boys
I agree with Bennett. In fact, in one of those wonderfully ‘meta’ moments, I remember having this exact feeling about this quote when I first watched The History Boys. Coming across ideas like this is magical, but it is something disappointing as you thought you’d maybe had an original thought, only to find someone else had beaten you to it. It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is frustrated that he can’t overtake Thomas Edison’s number of inventions, a pointless competition, only to discover that Edison himself had entered himself into a similar competition with Leonardo Da Vinci.
Second only to these moments of kinship that you feel in reading, is the (smug) satisfaction when you read different books and make the connections between ideas, like spotting a constellation from the stars. Allowing for affirmation bias which probably makes such ideas stand out, you can see where thinking is coalescing. This is of course a reason to read and to read widely at that. I recently took a subscription to The Atlantic and have had a look root around to see what’s there.
One piece really stood out to me, the latest editions of two of their newsletters: Nicole Chung’s ‘I Have Notes’ and Imani Perry’s ‘Unsettled Territory’. Chung writes about writing every day, driven by her professional commitments rather than a whimsical resolution committing me to a blog. She talks about benefiting from the frequency and flow of writing, acknowledging that amongst the really good bits there are more messy pieces. This resonates, I’m already feeling better about my daily writing habit and thinking about what to write and reflecting on my process is becoming part of the routine.
Imani Perry meanwhile talks about the rhythm of writing weekly and the need to write allowing you to work through blockages, with your thinking benefiting from the writing process. This reminded me of what Oliver Burkeman says about his morning pages. Some days you’re not sure what to write, but knowing you have to write something helps. You just get on and do it. It may be messy, but that is fine, it is part of the process. As Perry says, it is part of your growth.
Commonplace 