"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars… If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
In his essay “Why Bother?”, the author Jonathan Franzen discusses his disaffection with fiction writing in modern times, lamenting the cultural breakdown that has led to the decline of the novel as a socially relevant touchstone. Sales of books are down dramatically across the board, and only a select minority of writers can actually make a living doing it anymore. Contrast to not long ago, when novels were a potent force for change, or reform. The release of a work by a famous author was anticipated with the hype now reserved for the summer blockbuster. Authors themselves were considered cultural leaders, asking the right questions, challenging the status quo, and driving the national conversation. Think of the quintessential American works, the ones you were forced to read in high school: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye. They are stories of those on the margins—the poor, disenfranchised, exploited, and lonely. Stories of greed and vengeance, injustice and hope and the grace of reconciliation. Stories of humanity. They built the myths and identity of America.
Franzen is of that old guard. He is dismayed that today, novels have little cultural relevance outside academia, where they are perversely overanalyzed and wrung dry in search of the author's wokeness (or lack thereof). Some writers make a living from such books, knowing they will barely see the light of day outside of humanities departments. The major reason for the decline of the novel, though, Franzen says, is the decline of readers themselves, the fast-paced lives we now lead leaving no room for substantive or challenging books. And it’s true, Americans have a dysfunctional relationship with work. We take pride in eighty-hour workweeks, sacrificing our personal life in the name of productivity (much could be said here of the parallel decline of religion in American life, but that's for another time...), while technology, which was supposed to make our lives easier, has instead accelerated it. We simply have neither the time nor energy to devote to reading. Instead we satiate ourselves with TV and gossip, or more recently, scrolling social media.
Despite the decline, though, books are not yet dead—readers are still out there. Franzen recounts his discussion with social scientist Shirley Brice Heath, who outlines two distinct classes that remain. First, there are those whose reading habits were instilled and reinforced from a young age and by family and culture. This type is concentrated predominantly among the upper social classes, who prize books as a key to greater achievement and the good life. To them, reading is a valued, and valuable, hobby. Parents initially model this behavior, and while some children will outgrow it by adulthood, many do not, especially if they find a peer who shares their interest. But, Heath continues, there’s a second class of reader.
“There’s the social isolate—the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him. This is very, very difficult to uncover in an interview. People don’t like to admit they were social isolates as children. What happens is that you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you—because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community.”
"Social isolate" sounds a bit harsh, but Franzen clarifies that the term does not mean simply antisocial. On the contrary, some are actually hypersocial. “It’s just that at some point” he says, “you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading—to reconnect to that community.” These readers aren't reading for instruction. They are drawing water from the spring of life itself, quenching a thirst that nothing else can.
I’ve always understood something of this aspect of myself. I have a brother close in age, but as a child, I was content playing by myself if he wasn’t around, drawing and building with Legos and, yes, reading. Credit to my mom, who enrolled us in the summer reading program at the local library, which kept me picking up new things. I liked fantasy and adventure, science fiction, Harry Potter, the usuals. I learned the gravitational tug of a good book and its power upon falling into that world, often richer and more interesting than the one around me.
In high school, I did feel different. At least, I felt differently about things around me than I imagine most of my peers did. Something wasn’t quite right, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. I just couldn’t stand the drama, the fronting, the chaotic swirl of hormones and noise. I watched those around me desperately clinging to anything in sight to stave off the sting of rejection and assert their place in the social hierarchy. I wanted nothing to do with it.
I don't remember exactly how it started, but I began to skip my free period, when students mingle in the commons, going instead to the library. I would find the upholstered chair at the end of the aisle, looking out the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the school's interior courtyard. In my hands, White Fang, by Jack London. My own choice. In front of me may have been sidewalk and trees, but my mind was thousands of miles away, engrossed in the life and death struggles of the Yukon bush. Soon there were more: Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Vonnegut, Hesse. Quiet, bathed in light, the musty smell of the books, with no adult authority watching over, felt like freedom. Looking back, though, maybe that was just my own way of clinging to something.
That time stands out for another reason, though—it was when I discovered Thoreau. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," writes Henry David Thoreau in Walden, "to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Walden is an account of his experiment in simple living, away from the comforts and trappings of society, for over two years beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau describes building a cabin, planting beans, and his daily tasks, but also the goings-on of the plants and animals around him, meticulously recording the freeze and thaw cycles of the pond, the blooming of flowers and trees, the arrival of migratory songbirds, and his encounters with animals. It was the way he talked about these things, though, that was so captivating. In bright, musical lyricism, he spoke of nature not as malicious, chaotic, the dwelling place of evil, a force to be subdued and conquered, as was predominant in his day, but rather as intrinsically beautiful, a gateway to the divine. The soul was not separate from the body, but the body itself, in physical form. Living a simple life in nature is recognition of that fact.
To this day, Walden remains one of the most profound and radical things I've ever encountered. It spoke to everything I wanted at the time—independence, going off the grid, and a raw, unfiltered experience. I could imagine myself there doing those things. His rebellion against the church (I grew up Catholic) also felt right; I knew they didn’t have the whole story. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", he wrote. I was beginning to see organized religion as both source and symptom of that desperation, a paltry substitute for actual communion with the natural world. I couldn't believe that someone else already had these thoughts! I understood it. No, it understood me. My friends wouldn’t have known what I was talking about, but he did. It gave me permission to feel how I felt. Others had trod this path before me. I was not alone.
Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson are the best-known figures of American Transcendentalism, the literary and philosophical movement of early 19th century New England. The Transcendentalists, drawing widely from European philosophy, the teachings of the Unitarian Church, and eastern spiritual traditions, sought ways to strip away what they viewed as the morally corrupting elements of society to reveal the true, pure being that man essentially is. They emphasized self-reliance and the importance for every person to find this truth for themselves through direct experience. Man is sovereign to make his own life, on his own terms. The only authority worth listening to, worth making a life around, they said, is your own conscience. They sought to find God in nature, or nature AS God. I ate it up.
Being trained as a scientist has largely cured me (for lack of a better word) of religious leanings, but the I retain a strong an affinity for the Transcendentalists. Reading them led to similar works like Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, with which I had a mild obsession for a time (I still follow updates), and later, the bards of the sensuous outdoors: Whitman, Muir, Snyder, Berry, Leopold, Carson, Abbey, too many to name. With each, a new way of seeing, of listening. Heath's study subjects often reported that reading enables them to maintain a sense of ethical and intellectual integrity. “Substance", she said, "is more than ‘this weighty book.’ Reading that book gives me substance.” That's how it felt conversing with them through the page—like materializing out of thin air, piece by piece, assembling the person I would become.
In college, I discovered Franzen. Aside from award-winning novels, he has also written extensive non-fiction, particularly on environmental issues. Franzen, you see, is a passionate birder. In one especially influential essay titled "Climate Change vs. Conservation", he wrote about the fixation of environmental organizations with planning and mitigating for climate change, often while acting indifferently toward actual birds (or other species) here and now. Climate change is happening, yes, and important, but it is increasingly used as a catch-all bogeyman, diverting resources and attention from the real (and more controversial) measures that could be taken to protect species and habitats. Instead of general anxiety over the impending state of the world, Franzen was increasingly choosing to love and appreciate the "concrete and valuable" things right in front of us. "Even the most ominously degraded landscape could make me happy if it had birds in it”, he wrote. At the time, it fit with other things I was reading about the wrongheadedness of the modern environmental movement, which it was argued had made a fatal compromise, undermining its founding principles. What price do we pay, they asked, when every hilltop, desert, or shoreline is converted into a wind farm, solar array, or hydro-wave generator? Isn't something lost, something essential to us as human beings? The loss of beautiful wild places, even in the name of renewable energy, is loss all the same. As Paul Kingsnorth said, “Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.” Rather than continuing the all-out pursuit of more energy and greater consumption, we need a fundamentally new relationship with the natural world, one of reciprocity and restraint. It sounded like something the Trancendentalists would say.
Here's Franzen again:
“According to Heath, readers of the social-isolate variety are much more likely to become writers than those of the modeled-habit variety. If writing was the medium of communication within the community of childhood, it makes sense that when writers grow up they continue to find writing vital to their sense of connectedness. What’s perceived as the antisocial nature of ‘substantive’ authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J. D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world. Looking me in the eye, Heath said: ‘You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.’ I knew she was using the word 'you' in its impersonal sense. Nevertheless, I felt as if she were looking straight into my soul. And the exhilaration I felt at her accidental description of me, in unpoetic polysyllables, was my confirmation of that description’s truth. Simply to be recognized for what I was, simply not to be misunderstood: these had revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.”
I think some level of introspection is key to writing. You need to be able to step back and take stock—of facts, emotions, and opinions, and see, on some level, how they all fit together. It’s a quality I respect, because when it’s done well, you know. It just feels right, feels true. The imaginary world Heath mentions allows space to develop ideas and organically weave together those strands. Imagination is not the same as being lost in a fantasy, though, or daydreaming. Those terms feels loaded, like there’s something quaint or naïve about it, especially in an ironic culture where everyone is out to prove their hipness by mocking such things. But where do you think art comes from if not that deep, unknowable core of our being?
Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman defines imagination as the as the ability to comprehend and perceive what could be. Creativity, then, he says, is a combination of imagination and intelligence. Learning to write is learning to grasp and use those tools. Learning to think. The experience I have is like untangling a ball of thoughts, like yarn, methodically separating and untying each loop and strand from all others and laying it out straight and orderly, leaving the ball that much smaller when you’re done. The reason why good writers are so compelling is because they walk you through this process step by step, making your own thoughts and feelings clear to you and illuminating the darker, confused reaches of your mind. But it's also practice for the things we all must learn: Be yourself. Show, don’t tell. Keep up your end of the conversation.
On another level, writing, much like the aim of the Transcendentalists, is an attempt to overcome our physical limitations. Picking something off the shelf is time travel, bringing the author, even if long dead, there in the room with you. We suspend our disbelief in the supernatural, allowing things to happen in stories that disobey the laws of physics or convention. And ESP—instantaneous communication across space and time—is real (can’t you hear me talking in your head right now?). But overcoming physical limits also extends to the broader goals, the human ones. We seek to forge deeper connections to the world and those around us. I’m drawn to nature writing because that's what it tries to do—gain a sense for the story of one’s own life unfolding as a part of the greater whole. Seeing the self in the world, and the world in the self. When I go into the woods, Thoreau and Emerson are there too, speaking through the rocks and trees, and I craft my response, even if only in my head.
Sometimes, I do think “why bother?” The words just aren’t there. I am a fraud and no good… This isn’t going anywhere… What are you trying to prove? No one’s even reading it! But then that gnawing, remorseful need to quench that thirst begins to arise again. The need to set things right. I know that that tangled mess will be a little more manageable afterward, and I will have taken one more small step toward the Transcendentalists' ideals.
Franzen ends by recounting the worried letter he wrote fellow author Don DeLillo about the future of books. “Writing is a form of personal freedom", DeLillo responded. "It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals. If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end.”
For more: Here's an interview with Jonathan Franzen, Mark Leyner, and David Foster Wallace discussing some of these ideas.
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