why I write
We keep a journal to entrap that collection of selves that forms us, the individual human being.
(William Boyd, Any Human Heart)
An essay is not a vehicle of knowledge transmission; it is a landscape to think in, and a path to get there.
My difficulty is that I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.
Virgina Woolf
More and more, I find myself turning to reading and writing to grapple with the fact that I only get to live out one life. Chewing on the cud of my one earthly existence lets me experience life once on the way down—as I go about my day and live it all in real-time—and once again on the way back up, when I regurgitate it back onto the page.
It’s a li
... See morespag mol on Substack
ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.
Why I Write by George Orwell
So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.
Joan Didion • On Keeping a Notebook - Joan Didion
Modern Art by Craig Damrauer
We don’t have control of certain forums, but we can do a lot on a page.
via spag mol