why I write
These final acts in a writer’s life usually go unrecorded because the reality is too shaming, too sad, too banal. But, on the contrary, it seems to me to be even more important now, after everything that has gone before, to set down the facts as I experience them.
William Boyd • Any Human Heart
Modern Art by Craig Damrauer
Mill is trying to figure out what he believes is true, and what he can stand for, and how to live. But the way he does it is, at first glance, the opposite of feeling: he is constructing a system of thought, a philosophy. He is hunting down the contradictions in his intuitions and his thoughts; he insists on finding ways of thinking that allow him
... See moreSo 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
I started realizing that the way to get outside myself was to go further in.
via bookbear express
An essay is not a vehicle of knowledge transmission; it is a landscape to think in, and a path to get there.