When people ask me what I’m up to this summer, I tell of working at a startup, studying for the LSAT, hunting bears in Alaska, et al. But the bulk of my time I’ve spent writing.
I have posted some on this blog, written for the StockTwits blog, and also done some more technical writing on a newly launched blog about markets and trading. I’ve also been drawing upon the source events of my daily life to send detailed annals via email to friends, most of whom are spread out across the globe. By my count, I’ve churned out over 8000 words in the last week, probably a personal record for weekly extracurricular output. And that’s not even including my activity on The Twitter.
During a history seminar once, I posed a question: How did the Founding Fathers write so much?
With today’s technology, I can type upwards of 100 words per minute on my computer. I have spell checkers, grammar suggestions, and Google’s define gadget at my disposal, not to mention the wealth of information and data on The Internets. I don’t have to contend with feather-pens, hand-aches, ink-drip, or any other now-antiquated inconvenience. I can write a novel on a bus using my laptop or I can send emails while working out with my Blackberry. [I'm ashamed to admit that I run with my Blackberry -- for the Pandora access, of course, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't take a peak at my inbox mid-stride.]
But even without laptops and PDAs, the principal founders of our nation — Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, and Adams — wrote prodigiously, much more than I even at my best. Using only paper, pen, and pencil, they produced untold volumes of editorials, pamphlets, journals, letters, and legal documents.
Alexander Hamilton, my favorite founder, was an unusually prolific and vigorous writer. He wielded the pen with force — as fiery critic of the Articles of Confederation, proponent of ratification of the Constitution, first Secretary of the Treasury, and leader of the Federalist Party.
The 19th and 20th centuries yielded great tomes by the literary masters. The writing habits of Dickens, Balzac, and Hugo are the stuff of legend.
Perhaps lives today are too full of internets, television, movies, music, and other distractions that impinge on time. Maybe we’re seeing a shrinking of content at the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, messenger clients and SMS text. [I've written twice about the capacity of technology to make us stupid.]
It’s also thinkable that writing is simply about that dedication so conspicuously lacking in the modern world. Yet some have it. Judge Richard Posner is famous for his freakish productivity. The legal mastermind has written over thirty books, more than three hundred articles, and some two thousand judicial opinions. He has written books about AIDS, law and literature, and the Clinton impeachment trial, and articles about pornography, Hegel, and medieval Iceland.
Fred Exley, in his magnum opus, remembers a writing professor:
He, too, had wanted ‘to write’ when young; and if I took anything from his course, it was an observation that he made on Hemingway in Paris during the twenties. He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafes, Hemingway was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life, that though he did not know Hemingway, he knew of him, as all the young Americans in Paris did, and that Hemingway proved a constant provocation to them, like a furious clarion that books do not get written on the Montparnasse.
It’s a fair point. But I have another theory: we don’t write much because we don’t read much. The prolific writers were prolific readers first.
Thomas Jefferson told John Adams he couldn’t live without books. Adams read even more widely and more deeply than Jefferson, spending what extra coin he had on books. Adams wrote to Jefferson at age 79 about a particular set of books he coveted on the lives of the saints, forty-seven volumes in all. Ron Chernow details Hamilton’s reading habits in a great biography:
Hamilton read widely and accumulated books insatiably. The self-education of this autodidact never stopped. He preferred wits, satirists, philosophers, historians, and novelists from the British Isles: Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Laurence Stern, Oliver Goldsmith, Edward Gibbon, Lord Chesterfield, Sir Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, Horace Walpole, and David Hume. Among his most prized possessions was an eight-volume set of The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele; he frequently recommended these essays to young people to purify their writing style and to inculcate virtue. He never stopped pondering the ancients, from Pliny to Cicero to his beloved Plutarch, and always had lots of literature in French on his creaking shelves: Voltaire and Montaigne’s essays, Diderot’s Encylopedia, and Moliere’s plays.
An anecdote from David McCullough is enough to shame one into never again copping the lack-of-time excuse for not reading.
Once upon a time in the dead of winter in the Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt took off in a makeshift boat down the Little Missouri River in pursuit of a couple of thieves who had stolen his prized rowboat. After several days on the river, he caught up and got the draw on them with his trusty Winchester, at which point they surrendered. Then Roosevelt set off in a borrowed wagon to haul the thieves cross-country to justice. They headed across the snow-covered wastes of the Badlands to the railhead at Dickinson, and Roosevelt walked the whole way, the entire 40 miles. It was an astonishing feat, what might be called a defining moment in Roosevelt’s eventful life. But what makes it especially memorable is that during that time, he managed to read all of Anna Karenina.
Amazon is out with the latest savior for our refusal to read. The Kindle is cell phone meets novel. The white-plastic “reader” hopes to do for books what the iPod did for music. Steve Jobs famously dismissed the Kindle, saying that it didn’t matter whether it was good or bad: “The fact is that people don’t read anymore.”
Steve Jobs is dying — the odds are not only actuarial, they are clinical, says Tom Junod in an awesome profile. Junod delves deep into Jobs, analyzing a man whose adoption gave him complicated ideas about birth. The social networks have been abuzz with Steve Jobs chatter lately. But few have sought to understand the complex man behind the machines — the man whose long-lost sister wrote a novel called A Regular Guy. The protagonist is crafted in the mold of Jobs himself. Junod concludes:
Steve Jobs is not just the kind of guy who makes the definitive proclamation that “people don’t read anymore”; he’s the kind of guy who makes the definitive proclamation that people don’t read anymore when his sister — the child his biological parents kept — is an eminent American novelist. Who once wrote a book about him. That nobody read.
We don’t write because we don’t read. Bezos or Jobs, Amazon or Apple, Kindle or iPhone — which horse are you betting on?
Electronic marvels proliferate. Information and data are available like never before and at a finger’s touch. Content is an industry: words are a capitalist commodity, a bag of goods for consumer consumption. But content ingestion isn’t learning. Data and information aren’t knowledge. As we read less, we respond less. As we respond less, we write less. And as we write less, we are less. By writing less or by writing differently, we close the avenues through which we come to understand ourselves and our place in the world.
The digestion of a weighty book or a poem or an article — the processing of a piece of writing that enlarges one’s worldview — sharpens the experience of being alive. Even a few rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way one thinks and, by extension, alter the way one lives. Words spark fires of consciousness — and fires spread. Read. Respond. Write. Feel free to use more than 140 characters.
Kiley,
Long time no talk. I enjoyed your post very much. Dr. Miller told me about your blog last week. I would like to offer my own take on the death of writing, and I suppose the death of reading:
When talking about the writing and correspondence of the past, we can not overlook the time, and world, in which both took place. Obviously, we live in a much different world now than in the time of our Founding Fathers, and their world had (or lacked) various elements which allowed them to read and write to such an extent.
First, is time and money. Not to say the Founding Fathers were twittling their thumbs in between letters (they were laying the foundation for one of the greatest societies on Earth), but had the time that most lacked.
One only needs to read a few lines of a letter to know that it was a work of great time and effort. Because these men were educated and affluent, they could afford to write such volumes. And its not like everyone was releasing such tomes. There are plenty of farmers, or even educated merchants that, out of necessity, had to devote more time to their enterprise than their correspondence. Given their various backgrounds, not all Founding Fathers wrote to such an extent.
Today, I do not think that much has changed in the economics of writing: those who do it are the ones who can afford (or get payed) to do it. Most people simply do not have the time. Teddy was from a wealthy family and so he could go on hunting (on which he wrote a great deal) and exploring and reading and writing. A very different position from someone who was working in a factory or meat-packing plant or farm whose livelihood and survival required the majority of their conscious time and effort. Similarly, few people today have the time to write to a “prolific” degree.
Its getting late, and I could write a whole blog of mine own on this but I will make a few more quick considerations.
Modes of communication. Letters were longer, in part, because it was more efficient to express many idea in a long letter and then have someone respond in a long letter of their own; as opposed to waiting weeks to address one point at a time. Today, thanks to technology, a lengthy conversation can be had at great distances in the same format as an in-person conversation.
Also, there were fewer distractions. There wasn’t TV, the facebook, or professional sports to which they could devote time. There were just fewer ways to spend their time.
Ok, I am going to sleep. Let me hear your thoughts on my thoughts.
Hudson,
Good to hear from you and I hope all is well at Brown/in Texas.
A couple thoughts I had on your response. I think time is relative (as is the world). If you wanted to achieve the exact standard of living enjoyed by even the wealthiest men of, say, Teddy Roosevelt’s era, you would have to do actually quite little. In the modern world, we work harder and longer to achieve a standard of living those men could never have even dreamed of. Right now, I’m reading a book called “Spent. Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior” and it really makes you think about why we work so much. Surely, there are exceptions. There’s the uneducated single mother with three kids, etc. But in general, the time is there — it’s just what we decide to do with it.
I also think there are many distractions. This I agree with. Sometimes technology is a huge distraction. At night, I can watch 500 channels, I can share pointless conversations on a slew of internet widgets, I can take the elevator down and lounge with my laptop at the Italian eatery in my building. In the olden days, you didn’t have such options. When the sun expired, you had to tell stories, read, or write. So agreed on that.
But you’re right, thanks to technology we can have these lengthy conversations at a moment’s notice. Cheers to that.
[...] “reading project.” People don’t read anymore — I’ve written as much here and here – but the whole check-this-painting plan strikes me as a painfully shallow compromise [...]