Thoreau has thoughts about this. He wanted A Week to have an element of being written outdoors (see Dassow Walls biography and quote it here or take from his journal). Also, he made it a point to balance reading and writing with walking.
Nietszche has ideas on the same topic:
We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors – walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful. Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?
How quickly we guess how someone has come by his ideas; whether it was while sitting in front of his inkwell, with a pinched belly, his head bowed low over the paper – in which case we are quickly finished with his book, too! Cramped intestines betray themselves – you can bet on that – no less than closet air, closet ceilings, closet narrowness.
Books written indoors
- Written solely by reading other books.
- Overloaded with quotations, references, footnotes, explanations, refutations.
- Difficult to internalize
- Crammed with citations, annotations
- Boring
- Read slowly and with difficulty
- Written by comparing lines
- Written by repeating what others have said
- Commentary of a hundred books on a single sentence from another book
Books written outdoors
- Not overloaded with vain erudition.
- Free from the bonds of other books and the thought of others.
- Contains no explanation from anyone
- Simply expresses one’s thought, judgement, and decision.
- “Thought born out of movement”
- Thought about the thing itself—without the barriers of culture and tradition.
- Light but profound thoughts—no exegesis.
- Light thoughts rise from conviction, opinion, and established thought.
- Gros has a point. I think what he is comparing here mainly is writing that requires references (well, you can’t write these kinds of books when you are inside a room, for sure). When you are walking, what you usually capture are your own thoughts—still thinking about others sometimes, but less attached to them, less depedent.
- The simple strategy:
- Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.
To do
- I remember here that Steve Patterson also detests using references and citations. This according to him (if my memory is correct), a midieval way of scholarship. I need to relate this to what he said. If this is how we should write and think, then this is what I need to do.
Tags: Fruitful
References
Gros, F. (2014). A Philosophy of Walking. Verso.
Thoreau, Emerson recalls, had made it a principle to give no more time to writing than he had to walking. To avoid the pitfalls of culture and libraries; for otherwise, what one writes is filled with the writing of others.
Writing ought to be this: testimony to a wordless, living experience. Not the commentary on another book, not the exegesis of another text.
Thus does the book, born out of experience, refer to that experience. Books are not to teach us how to live (that is the sad task of lesson-givers), but to make us want to live, to live differently: to find in ourselves the possibility of life, its principle.