Essays I don't have time to write
Or why it is easy to write about knowing and hard to write about learning
“I worry that choosing the essay form implies that I know something.”
That, like the title of this… —I am always waffling between calling this form either a post or a letter… essay is not right either, but we’ll come back to that— comes from the playwright Sarah Ruhl. But there is something a little deceptive about the title 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014), because while the book invokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own in essay #1, it approaches the problem “what does the [woman] writer need?” not so much as a straightforward issue of a lack that can be supplied, but as a conceptual problem related to where writing sits within that cognitive ecosystem that is verbal creation: the resolution of “how a voice answers a voice” (Woolf again) or, in Ruhl’s version, how “to be the only person in the room who should know which word should follow which word.”
As a playwright, it is no wonder that Ruhl is somewhat ambivalent on fetishizing the action of writing above all the other verbal activities we engage in when we are trying to get words to clip together in a way that satisfies. So much more than a poet or a novelist, playwrights accept that writing is not sculpture, producing a fixed form that repels further manipulation of its materials.
The essay—as a thousand essayists and humanities scholars have reminded us—promises by its name to approach the physical action of writing as but one stage in a grander “experiment” or “attempt.” Like the formation of a hypothesis in the scientific method, writing an essay does require precision, alertness, definition, but it is also (ostensibly) humble about not being an end-in-itself. A “polished essay” in the sense of a piece of writing that presents itself as a closed system and a final product should be a contradiction in terms.
Yet there is a paradox in the way the tradition of the essay is understood, I think, because we insist on approaching essays as the conclusion reached after a difficult struggle cajoling a cloud of insights, analogies, and facts into an opinion worth telling other people. Writing an essay is the action we perform when we feel we are ready to begin that struggle and have a reason to believe that we will end up with that worthwhile opinion as our reward. We write an essay when we think we know something, when we think we have learned enough to say that we now know it.
It is thus very difficult to write if you feel you are still learning because learning devours time. If you feel that you know something, finding the time to communicate what you know is mostly a matter of gluing minutes together and avoiding distractions. We may find out that we are wrong—that we don’t know what we thought we did—but knowing is a still point from which to jump into writing; the current of learning has ceased and one can stand and consider one’s form, one’s entry point, the depth one hopes to reach, before taking a plunge.
All of this is in the way of grappling with why I am not writing more. It is easy to blame the vortex of parenthood as a persistent disruption that wrecks one’s writing plans, but Ruhl has something beautiful to say about this:
There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me (truly you have not lived until you have changed one baby’s diaper while another baby quietly vomits on your shin), and finally I came to the thought, All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate the pauses.
I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.
I am not writing more because we are not used to thinking about writing as a part of being on the way to something else—even journaling is about its own “ongoingness,” as Sarah Manguso puts it, rather than about some other future product or destination. What name, then, would better capture the idea not just of being unfinished, but of being instrumental for achieving something else beyond itself, something that may not be a text at all but simply a deeper and ever-deepening knowledge? Étude, perhaps? Until something better comes along, consider these études, essays that I don’t have the time to write because I haven’t reached the point where I feel settled in my knowledge of a thing.