Reading and writing in the chaos
Over breakfast each morning I read news about the world, thinking each morning that it surely couldn’t get any worse, seeing on many mornings that, in fact, it could — and, in fact, has. Many mornings I think I really should post something here about the news. Most mornings I decide that I really don’t have any thing to add to what others are saying, no real insight, no deep understanding. Just anger, fear, and general unsettledness.
Sometimes, though, I imagine what future historians (if there are historians in the future) would think happen to stumble onto some of my posts. (Bear with me here — I know it’s unlikely that future historians would care to read these posts — this is really a thought experiment.) Would they wonder how/why I could take the time to write about discovering Haruki Murakami when things are falling apart? Or why I think it’s worthwhile to write anything at all about the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, who died in the middle of the last century? Or any of the other things I’ve written over the past three years? But set the writing aside. Why do I spend all of this time reading? And if I’m going to read, shouldn’t I devote my reading to works that could help me understand what I and others might do to stop the destruction?
Maybe.
But then I remember Rebecca Solnit writing so poignantly about Orwell and his roses. And the philosopher Heinrich Blücher’s letter to Hannah Arendt while they were separated in occupied France, celebrating the fact that he defeated Walter Benjamin in a game of chess. And that Blücher carried and read a copy of Kant while imprisoned in the camps before he and Arendt escaped to the United States.
I don’t claim to be Orwell, or Arendt, or Blücher. But I do think that there’s room in the world, even a world as tortured as ours, for reading, thinking, and writing.
At least, that’s what I tell myself as I approach the end of the day, thinking about what I might read in the news over breakfast tomorrow.
