A Spark

People sometimes talk about how, when they were children, the world felt vibrant and magical. Now they’re adults, and they feel like a screen has come between them and the wonder of it all. But it had been unfiltered and undiluted once.

For years people would tell me this, and I would frown and crinkle my brow and say nothing. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by saying I had no idea what they were talking about. But, thinking back to my own childhood, I found nothing at all wondrous.

You see, I was a cerebral little kid. At five-years-old, my conversation consisted mostly of reciting memorized elephant facts. As I grew older, my repertoire expanded to include cetacean facts, dinosaur facts, and astronomy facts. And, I can tell you, I enjoyed my educational VHS tapes and DK reference books much more than I enjoyed seeing live elephants or orcas, much more than I enjoyed seeing fossils or constellations. I don’t remember ever being bitten by a radioactive library card, but, somehow, ideas were the solid thing for me; reality was puzzling and unwieldy.

These tendencies did not self-correct as I got older. I remained susceptible to nearly anything theoretical. Math never quite became a favorite because I wasn’t detail-oriented, but big-picture ideas could capture my heart in an instant. There’s a vivid memory from my teenage years of listening to a lecture about Thomas Hobbes (aw, look at what a smart kid I was), which described his project as trying to give politics geometrical precision—and my immediate thought was, “Yes, exactly, that’s how it should be!” I picked political theory as my college major. But by my senior year of college, I’d deemed political theory insufficiently abstract to really get at things—so I applied (and was accepted to) a graduate program for philosophy.

Ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas. That was my adolescent mantra. Or would have been if my adolescent self had been capable of a less-than-book-length mantra.

The very first time in my life that something pierced through my bubble of abstraction was the summer of my gap year before starting graduate studies. I had just gone through a breakup (my first) with my college girlfriend, and perhaps my gaping emotional wounds were what finally let reality through my defenses. My brother and his friend were watching all of Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography as a summer project, and I found myself joining them.

In those films, I felt a strange and solid something that couldn’t put into words. I didn’t know what to do with it. My twenty-two years of gliding through life on clouds of ideas had not prepared me for the sudden shock of feeling my foot meet solid ground. These animated features got stuck in my head, became vague but precious touchstones. There was something portentous in them, I felt, but whatever it was perplexed me.

I began grad school with this crack in my armor. But I was too set in my ways to avoid sinking right into the warm bathwater of philosophy. I felt at home in the Realm of Ideas. Pure theory, pure abstraction, poured in through my eyes and descended on my brain. Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz—such like-minded friends in my quest to bring all that messy-looking world under the eternal cosmic harmony of ideas. Give me but a platform and the intellectual equivalent of a lever, and I will arrest and order the whole cosmos!

But if the mesmerizing power of the written word put me more in bondage than ever to my idealism, the counter-attack came by the same vehicle. The book was Anna Karenina.

Oh, Anna Karenina, what encomia could I possibly compose for you? To have bottled in a mere six-hundred pages the beating heart of life! Your characters are as real as if they were molded from Prometheus’s own clay. Your incidents as familiar as if they were my own recollections. But to these real characters and true events, you bring such insight and such attention that every page cannot help but glow with the burning spark of stolen divine fire. Your author was unworthy of you; your readers are unworthy of you; I am the most unworthy of all.

It wasn’t the work of a moment. It takes more than a moment to read Anna Karenina, after all. And, doubtless, a hundred little forces had been working on me already. But, however it happened, I saw for the first time that the feeling of solidity and life I had felt during that summer of movie-watching existed in real life. Indeed, it was real life. If I paid attention to real things, if I wasn’t too sleepy and if I wasn’t too distracted, they exuded the same aura of dependable veracity. Anna Karenina was my window from the prison tower of ideological seclusion to the real world. Up ‘til then, I hadn’t fully realized I’d been indoors.

And so, in my grad school days, I finally met for the first time this childlike wonder I’d heard so much about.

What’s the point of writing?

This is a stupid question. There are as many reasons to write as there are pens, laptops, note apps, and typewriters combined. Think-piecing, list-making, complimenting, critiquing, reminding, accusing, seducing, dissuading, explaining, entertaining, and deceiving—to indicate a few. It isn’t the case that one of these is the point of writing and the others are somehow illegitimate. Why, the earliest cuneiforms we’ve found are often just notes that so-and-so owes so-and-so such-and-such; considered from a certain point of view, a notification from your cash-transfer app has better scriptorial provenance than the works of Shakespeare.

But allow me to answer this stupid question in a personal way, not attempting to set up a rule for anyone to follow, but following my own lights.

What is the point of writing?

Communicating ideas, someone might say. But goodness! Surely ideas would cause enough mischief without being contagious too. Still, if bad ideas will be communicable, I suppose good ideas will have to aspire to the same. I hope the ideas I’m peddling here are good ones. We writers must all take a turn dumping antivenin into the town water supply.

But what I want most is not to communicate ideas. I have grander aspirations.

What’s the point of writing?

For me, the point is the catch a little of life’s lightning in my feeble word-built bottle so that, when you read, the bolt jumps and gives you an electric shock. An electric shock can be a wonderful thing sometimes. When ideas, ideas, ideas, ideas had frozen my heart, it took an electric shock from Anna Karenina to defibrillate me. If my own feeble lightning can do that for one person…

Welcome to the Real World Catalog. My blog, or newsletter as they’ve taken to calling them. If you’ve read my About page, you know that this publication doesn’t have a narrow topical theme. You’re in for an eclectic ride if you subscribe. But I hope that whatever you read here electrifies. If not, do feel free to stop reading, put down your phone, and go walk outside while contemplating death instead.

But I’m working hard on my end to make sure the words which appear here have an animating spark. Wish me luck.