I spent most of yesterday writing an essay. An essay! Earlier in the week I’d been busy with other things – letters, queries, research, World Cup – and felt guilty for not writing. Yesterday, struggling to get out eight hundred words, I felt guilty writing.
Writing used to be such a worthwhile endeavor, the essay a very noble form. Lamb, Emerson, Chesterton, White. But who has the time to muse these days, and who has the inclination to care about anybody else’s musings? It seems ridiculous, self-centered, unproductive to labor over a lead in the 21st century, to try to put complex thoughts into words. In the time it took me to write one paragraph I could have sent a hundred tweets. The wordsmith is going the way of the blacksmith in our new techno-video-info-mundo.
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