I thought it was interesting that Sword (2021: loc 1306) frames this as a matter of “cutting ourselves loose from the world of the sense and giving ourselves over to the flow of ideas”. The objection might seem like a pedantic one but I think it’s important to recognise the sensory pleasure which we can and do take in ideas, even if this by no means exhausts what satisfaction can be found in thinking. I want to suggest this sensory pleasure is important for what Fitzpatrick (2019: loc 122) calls ‘generous thinking’: “a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, collaboration over competition, and lingering with the ideas that are in front of us rather than continually pressing forward to where we want to go”.
To linger is to stay longer than is strictly necessary, to be reluctant to leave and to be slow to act. If we are reluctant to leave what is keeping us in place? If we are slow to act what leaves us unwilling to move onto the next thing? Generous thinking in this sense entails an unwillingness to immediately mobilise ideas, to see them as resources through which we advance our intellectual career, rather than as focal points for the pleasures which permit our academic lives to be in some reliable sense satisfying.
The sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote to a struggling friend to remind him of the things in life to get excited about, in a passage which has stayed with me since I first read it over a decade ago:
“You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been ploughed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote about and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we just now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.”
It has often felt to me like the pleasure of writing should be understood alongside the sensory pleasures which Mills lists here. He describes “the books to read never touched”, “to revise your mode of talk” and “the feel of an idea” alongside snow, jazz and the mystical stillness of a major city as it sleeps. Every time I read this passage I’m brought back to living in central London, which made it possible to walk through the metropolis in that small window in which it was quiet. There’s a calming quality to these pleasures, a sense of being lifted out of ourselves in a manner which is deeply soothing.
I would suggest that writing, which I understand as a process in which we work with ideas, carries the same potential even if we struggle to realise it. Ideas feel a certain way. Giving form to nebulous insights feels a certain way. Being lost in conversation with people who share your intellectual passions feels a certain way. Being immersed in a thought provoking book feels a certain way. Being frustrated by it feels a certain way. There’s an embodied quality to these pleasures which can be easily overlooked if we too readily invest ourselves in the notion of writing as a cognitive process.
Elbow (1981: 340) draws attention to the embodied quality of new ideas as they emerge for us in the writing process:
“See which part of your body the thought wants to erupt through. Some researchers have found that children have a physical reaction – a piece of tension-release in some part of their body, a shiver of jiggle – when they figure something out. What’s special about figuring something out is that it always consists of a new thought or a new connection, and you can’t have a new thought without really experiencing it.”
There are a rich array of sensory pleasures to be found in the writing process, which take on different meanings for different people and at different points in careers. They can also, I will argue, be squeezed out by other factors which shape what and how we write. In fact this is the norm rather than the exception.
But if we practice naming these experiences, identifying them when they occur, it comes to be easier to recognise and value them. It makes lingering easier, both in terms of justifying it when our to-do list calls to us and allowing the impulse to arise in the first place. To intellectually linger requires making space in which the continual flow of demands can ease, if not be entirely interrupted. This might be taking a book and a notepad to a coffee shop near your office, leaving laptop and phone behind. It might be taking the risk of approaching a speaker at a workshop, in order to voice the ideas which their talk provoked in you. It might be contacting a former collaborator who you now see far too infrequently, in order to suggest catching up via Zoom with no set agenda.
If there is an agenda it ceases to be lingering. It might be that a project or collaboration frames the interaction, with the intention to explore something you might do together in future. But it is possible to linger within the interaction, finding space to enjoy the engagement through which projects might unfold in the future, as opposed to defining your meeting in terms of what it should produce.
Obviously this is more difficult to achieve in practice than it is to opine about in a blog post. If you’re rushing from one commitment to the next it can be extraordinarily difficult to find time to write, let alone savour the ‘feel of the ideas’ you encounter in your writing. If it feels like a continual struggle to find any sustained time for writing, then lingering in the way I’m describing can feel like an unfathomable indulgence: a distraction from both the important and the urgent.
The suggestion frequently made in writing manuals and workshops that academics should not wait for the perfect time to write is certainly correct from a practical perspective. If you can only write on those occasions when it’s possible to block out sustained periods of time freed from other interruptions, then writing will inevitably be confined to summer and sabbaticals at best. But writing in the gaps can also be a stultifying experience, in which the size of the thoughts you think and the ideas you express is curtailed to match the limitations of the time and space available to you.
Writing in the gaps can be a pragmatic adaptation if undertaken in a careful way. It can also be a creative choice if undertaken in a reflective way. But if not embraced with care and reflection it can lead to a shrinking of creative horizons, with rushed writing undertaken in odd moments leading to odd writing marked by a rushed quality.
This is why I believe reflection is so crucial to academic writing: not just reflection on what we write, but on how and why we write. There is nothing intrinsic to how you write which dictates which outcome you will experience. It is unhelpful to imagine there is a right way of approaching your writing, which others have already found but which feels frustratingly beyond your grasp. What is right for you will not be right for someone else. What is right for you at a particular point in your career, or even your week, might not be right for you at another point in time. The key is developing awareness of when you experience those sensory pleasures of ideas that Mills and Elbow describe, and creating conditions where you can linger with them, even if only briefly, amid the demands of academic life.
Mark Carrigan 