Evolution of the Cosmos from a single point (Bindu), c. 1700

Since I began working on this essay three hours ago, around 21,000 people have, statistically, died. Now the sky is low and cloudy; I’m feeling tired, and looking at the numbers, I learn that about 10 million people are having sex as I type this sentence.

It can be hard to appreciate just how large each moment of each day is, how much more is going on than we experience.

Even just thinking about the fact that every place I’ve ever visited still exists (however reconfigured) gives me vertigo. In the medical factory where I worked at 21, the production lines are still going, and have done so, more or less continuously, for the 15 years since I last thought of them. There are people living in every house and apartment I’ve ever stayed in: if I were to go back and peek through the windows, I’d see them, as real as I. Also, everyone I’ve ever been on a date with is—I hope—still alive, somewhere, occupied with a life that feels like the world to them. And everyone I’ve worked with, or met on a bus, or been to school with.

I think about this, or rather I feel it—the heaviness of it—as I read the first six books of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. It is one of the more moving experiences of art I’ve had this year.

The premise of Balle’s novel series is, for those who haven’t read it, that the same day—November 18th—repeats over and over. Every morning a piece of French toast falls from a table at a hotel in Paris. The same football team wins the match in the same way, and the fans get drunk at the same bar. In an apartment in Clairon-sous-Bois, a man boils tea in the morning, always in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. And a girl sits on a train crying after being dumped, over and over again. The clouds retrace their paths across the sky.

Only one person, Tara Selter, whose diary we are reading, notices what is happening. Only she is not trapped in an eternal return. She can do whatever she wants. She is free to change.

Because we cannot move freely in the dimension of time, we experience reality as a series of three-dimensional moments succeeding one another. But if we could observe spacetime from the outside, reality would look like a 4-D object with time as its fourth dimension. Every chair and stone and person would reveal itself as a so-called world line—a four-dimensional object extending through time. In the same way that we can walk around a sculpture and see it from different angles, we would be able to observe the sculpture’s world line at different points in time—in the morning light, in the moment a child tries to climb the sculpture, in the moment the sculptor carved it, three hundred thousand years earlier, when the stone lay hidden in the bedrock. The sculpture would reveal itself as the four-dimensional object that (I’m told the theory of relativity says) it always was.

Something similar happens in Balle’s series.

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The Dancing Class, Edgar Degas, 1871-72

• Here are some notes about something I’m trying to get my head around. I would appreciate feedback and reflections!

• At the end are some recommendations of films and books I’ve found interesting lately.

In Récoltes et Semailles there is a famous passage where the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck writes about the years he spent as a young man isolated from the mathematical world, and how the experience of solitude was the key to his creativity.

Because of the Second World War, which Grothendieck partly had to spend in the internment camp at Rieucros, by 1945, as a seventeen-year-old, he was almost entirely self-taught as a mathematician. Too poor to get into a good school, he spent three years as a student in Montpellier, where the teaching was inadequate for his capacity, and where he therefore almost entirely avoided the lectures to instead pursue his own questions (and pick oranges to pay for his rent).

Three years later, when Grothendieck arrived in Paris to study at the École Normale, the French elite school for the country’s most gifted students, it became obvious how far behind his new classmates he was; they had spent their childhoods in private schools and with tutors.

Grothendieck writes that,

I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end.

While the other students had been attending lectures, Grothendieck had, among other things, spent his time being confused by what length is. None of his teachers had been able to give him a satisfactory answer—they thought it was obvious what length was. His new teachers also brushed away what he had spent his teenage years on—the insights about length he had arrived at had already been known for thirty years as the Lebesgue integral! In the eyes of the faculty in Paris, his effort had been wasted.

But in Grothendieck’s eyes it had “not been wasted in the least.” In his eyes it was precisely that solitary work, when he had reinvented what a more competent teacher could have taught him—it was that work that allowed him, over the course of the next thirty years, to leave a mark on the history of mathematics, while his more competent classmates failed to do so.

Grothendieck, again:

In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn’t really capture my meaning. I didn’t, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945–1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law....

That is to say, the work in solitude had trained his ability to autonomously navigate to interesting and valuable problems—an ability that is crucial for navigating skillfully at the frontier of human knowledge and expanding what we know. (I also suspect that Grothendieck underrates how much more naturally gifted he was than his peers.)

(Johanna and I have written about Grothendieck in more detail here.)

One way to think about what happened during those years of solitude was that what Grothendieck developed was mental proprioception.

Proprioception (without the adjective mental in front of it) is our ability to, without the help of sight, determine how our limbs are positioned. It is a kind of three-dimensional sense for our body.

Ballet dancers have extremely good proprioception. In fact, a large part of the challenge in becoming a skilled dancer is precisely that kind of feel for the position of the limbs: it is at least as important as having the muscles required to execute the movements. A large share of ballet training is devoted to developing proprioception. You stand in front of a mirror and execute movements while observing what you are doing, so that you can more accurately correlate the shape of a good movement with how it feels in the body when it is performed. When the dancers have a deep, precise understanding of how it should feel when the back is straight in the right way, and the ankle bent correctly, and the leg lifted just so … then they can, during the performance, follow their feeling and know that the form is correct, and they can notice precisely what is wrong when they deviate.

The thought I am playing with is that the same is true for our thoughts: it is possible to have a better or worse sense for how our thoughts flow around in our heads. And it is possible to train your mental proprioception so that you can feel when your state of mind has the right shape for generating valuable thoughts and solving the problems in front of you, or when your mental posture is wrong.

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At the end of the post, I’ve listed some good things I’ve read / watched / listened to recently.

Here is something I’m think about—

The day before we left for Málaga, Johanna was talking to me about how a lot of consumption tends to make us lose touch with ourselves.

If she goes to check something on the internet, for instance, she often forgets what she meant to do and discovers, half an hour later, that she’s aimlessly scrolling things that make her feel ambiently bad. Even just having internet turned on at home makes her—and me—feel less in touch with ourselves, as if some distracting noise is heard in the back of the head, making it harder to fully tune into ourselves. The internet (and other similar types of consumption, such as TV series) often creates some sort of insatiable hunger that makes you lose touch with yourself.

And then there are the other kinds of consumption (if consumption is even the right word): the kinds that tend to bring us back into ourselves. Looking at paintings, for example. In the evenings, when we’re too tired to work, Johanna and I sometimes open a page in an art book and look at it for 10 minutes (we can’t do it for much longer than that: paintings, unlike reading the internet, spit us back out after a while). And despite having allowed ourselves to get completely absorbed by something external, when we close the art book, we feel more attuned to ourselves.

On the ferry, traveling to the airport, Johanna and I discussed why this is.

There’s this passage from the memoirs of the composer Philip Glass, which I think can shed some light on why art—good art—can bring us into a closer connection with ourselves. Glass writes that,

[when I compose music for films,] I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the image. I look at it once. Maybe twice, but not more than twice. Then I depend on the inaccuracy of my memory to create the appropriate distance between the music and the image. I knew right away that the image and the music could not be on top of each other, because then there would be no room for the spectators to invent a place for themselves. Of course, in commercials and propaganda films, the producers don’t want to leave a space: the strategy of propaganda is not to leave a space, not to leave any question. Commercials are propaganda tools in which image and music are locked together in order to make an explicit point, like “Buy these shoes” or “Go to this casino.”

Because art has a gap, a distance, a space we need to fill, well—there is little wonder that, at the end of a session sitting before a painting, we feel more connected to ourselves. To make a painting meaningful, we need to fill it with meaning; we need to listen inward and channel the felt sense that the painting evokes into the gaps left in the art. We need to attune to ourselves. And so when we step out of it, we feel closer to ourselves.

Art can in this way be seen as a kind of guided meditation. It is an external structure that guides our attention until we’ve achieved an interesting and deep connection to what happens inside of us. But it is not only art that is like this. Many things can attune us to ourselves if we attune to them.

I thought about this a lot during the week we spent in Málaga.

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A polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky

I had a discussion about writing with Johanna, my wife and collaborator. The context is that she is in the early stages of a new writing project—she knows the rough outline of the ideas she wants to cover, but the actual content of the essay is fuzzy. She asked me what I would do in this situation, to go from rough idea to first draft. Here are some bullet points from our discussion:

• I would be tempted to start writing the essay, but that would be a mistake. Everyone is different, but for me, writing essays is like shooting a documentary. I need to record the raw footage before I sit down and edit the film. And I want to have more footage than I will use, often a lot more.

• By raw footage, I mean actual prose—not outlines, not summaries—about the topic I want to write about. But I don’t mean essay-grade prose: that is too costly to write; it would be like making the actual film. I mean rough attempts written as fast as I can, as well as excerpts from my journal, transcriptions of conversations I’ve had about the topic, and quotes from books I’ve read, and my comments on the quotes. Very rough and pragmatic stuff.

• And importantly: this rough, raw material needs to be “at the same resolution” as the final essay. Again, imagine you are making a documentary—let’s say, you’re Werner Herzog, and you’re making Into the Abyss. The opening scene of that film is “Herzog interviewing a reverend who in 15 minutes will be accompanying a young man to his execution.” If that summary was all Herzog had, it would be impossible to know if the scene deserves to be in the film; it all comes down to the detail. The reason the scene belongs in the film, and in the opening of the film, is that the reverend ends up telling a story about a squirrel—and not only that, it belongs in the film because of the way his face looks before, during, and after he’s told the story. Herzog only knew these details of the scene until after the interview had been shot. So the decisions about what should be in the film couldn’t be made until after the raw footage had been collected. It is the same, for me, when it comes to essays. I can write all the outlines I want (and I do, because they are a tool that lets me remember ideas that I haven’t had time to unpack yet), but there’s little point in writing the outline until I’ve made full length sketches of all the ideas in it, and all the examples and anecdotes I could use and so on.

• But isn’t that the same thing as writing it? I guess it might be for some. But for me, if I think I’m writing the essay, I get all tense and start polishing the prose and put in way too much effort into ideas and stories that might not deserve to be in the essay. And when I do that, I get reluctant to cut the material, which means the essay gets bogged down with mediocre stuff. I need to write rough notes and so on, so that I can go really fast and try many ideas and see them in high resolution, before I edit together the essay and polish the prose. During the preproduction of an essay, I want to write 1,000 words an hour or more. I want to go fast enough that I can afford to try many more ideas than I will end up using.

• Johanna points out that I tend to create and collect raw material in a few different ways:

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I recently wrote a post about books and essays that have had a big impact on me. A few days after writing it, I read another essay that struck me at that level. The essay in question is “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts” by Iris Murdoch. I haven’t yet been able to figure out why it hit me with such force and the implications of its ideas, but…

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“The Key to Dreams”, René Magritte, 1930

1.

When drawing from real life, the trick is to spend more time looking at the thing you are trying to capture than at your drawing. This is true for writing, too.

2.

When I was in my early twenties, I tried to write poems like Tomas Tranströmer. I did close readings of all his collections and reverse-engineered what he was doing. But no matter how hard I tried, every poem I wrote was dead on the page. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

At some point during this time, I saw an interview with Tranströmer from the early 1980s where the reporter asked how he came up with his poem, “The Open Window.” In the poem, a man is shaving by an open window in the bathroom on the second floor when the razor turns into a helicopter and flies out low across the summer. Tranströmer thought for a bit, then answered that he had the idea for the poem one morning when he was shaving by the open window in the bathroom on the second floor and got the feeling that the purr of his razor was that of a helicopter, and—looking out through the window—felt like he was flying out across the summer.

I remember thinking that this was a funny way to avoid talking about what his poem meant and where it came from, which he disliked doing. But now I think what Tranströmer said was a genuine attempt to explain where his poetry came from. Good writing isn’t about studying how great essays or poems look and then figuring out how to reverse engineer that (though that’s part of it). Rather, it’s about learning how to pay close attention to your thoughts and feelings and the concrete materiality of the world, and mastering the craft so you can translate what you see onto the page. My poems failed because I was looking at the paper, not at the thing I was trying to capture.

3.

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Edward Weston, Armco Steel, Ohio, 1922

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Isamu Noguchi, Ashtray Prototypes, 1945-1948

An alert thinker will often find more that is instructive and delightful in the playful writings of great men than in their serious works.
—Lichtenberg

In January, I was in the mood to read fragments: the leftover scraps authors have in their notebooks, the tangents they’ve cut from their main works. Fragments attract me—the straight-to-the-bone quality of the writing, the way it captures the underlying structure of how someone thinks by giving you hundreds of discrete data points instead of one long line of edited thought.

Fragments and notes are also a way of writing that is well-fitted for the complexity of the worlds we inhabit nowadays. Here is Kapuschinski on why he turned to fragments as a literary form in the 1970s and 80s (my translation):

A problem arises when one confronts the world and realizes how fragmented it is, decimated, self-contradicting, full of movement, full of incredibly charged questions and things. And this one has to describe! It’s not possible to do so epically; too many things pile up under the pen, and such different things, so incredibly mixed up, tangled and unclear things that are constantly changing, as the configurations are constantly transforming. One can only work fragmentarily, with fragments that touch on aspects of the world’s complex reality and try to illustrate it. Nothing can be done in any other way, as far as I see it. Naturally, a genius might suddenly emerge who can master the entirety of this world’s reality, an extraordinary person, but I doubt it.

This put me in the mood to do another collection of fragments (see the previous two here and here).

So, I’ve gathered tangents that I cut from essays in the last few months. The themes of the fragments are: figuring out how to find meaningful work; writing about things that matter to you; dealing with anxiety; and how to use modularity to make life easier to optimize.

At the end, there is a list of stuff I’ve enjoyed recently.

The anxious narrator

October 3, 2024. For the last nine days, I’ve had a pressure across my chest. Nothing has seemed meaningful to me, and my thoughts have been racing trying to figure out why and what to do about it.

Listening to my inner narrator trying to make sense of what is going on has been (almost) amusing. It is amusing because objectively speaking the reason I’m feeling blue is no mystery: in September, I put up 5 exhibitions and published ~20,000 words while homeschooling our kids and helping the carpenters change the roof of our house—my system is predictably out of balance. Underslept, overstressed. But the funny thing is that the voice in my head refuses to acknowledge that what is going on inside me has anything to do with these trivial bodily needs. Instead, it comes up with these outlandish conspiracy theories about why things feel bad, “Oh, what if you are on the wrong path? Perhaps you’ve misunderstood some part of the byzantine EU tax code and they’ll take your house? And . . . what if that scratchy itch on your head is cancer?”

It is like those cases where people with epilepsy get their brain halves surgically disconnected. The researchers whisper a dirty joke in the ear connected to the part of the brain that doesn’t control speech. The subject giggles. Then the researchers ask the other ear why they giggled, and the subject says, “Oh, that cabinet looks so funny!”

The narrator in my head is like that. It is 100 % sure that it is right, even though it is disconnected and ignorant of the parts of the system that are causing the problem. It would make a good political pundit.

The wise and experienced part of me says, “Well, no, actually the body that you and I live in just need to sleep and eat and spend a few days in nature. We’ve seen this before. It feels like an intellectual problem but it is actually just the body that is out of sync.”

And the narrator says, “No, no. Not this time. This time it is because the universe is meaningless!”

When I was younger the narrator used to convince me and I’d get carried away and try to solve my problems; I would have a miserable time. But one of the perks of getting older is that I have enough emotional experience now, so I trust that if I just take care of my bodily needs, the feelings and thoughts will sort themselves out—even if I don’t find that intellectually plausible in the moment. I will let the voice spin its stories for a few days while I sleep and eat and lay down with the 3-year-old on my belly. Slowly the narrator will become sane again.

A reflection about modularity and how I found work that felt meaningful

When there are strong selection pressures for success, evolutionary pressures often select for modularity:

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Untitled, Olaf Rude, 1938

I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog, and she pulled a few thoughts from me:

1. It is what is odd about you that is interesting. If you work hard, you will be able to write like everyone else in your genre, but the result will never be rich as the texture of your own personality. So, don’t think too much about how you are supposed to write, how others do it, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself.

2. Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.

3. A classic pattern: you try hard to write like someone else, but then you mess up and write in some stupid other way, and that ends up being what people relate to. I wish I had messed up sooner.

4. People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.

5. Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.

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“Yes?”

“Can I go to sleep now?”

Now we’re back on the island and I’ve set up a new home office in the old woodshop, where I hope to…

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Microscope image of wood tissue

On 24 September, I wrote in the waste book about how I created the essays I’m most happy with. I was looking for patterns in my processes (and how the processes behind the good essays differed from those that led to the many mediocre essays I’ve written over the last 3.5 years).

The idealized version of how my better essays were written looked like this (abbreviated):

1. I spend plenty of time reading, talking to interesting people, and writing in my notebooks. (Starting essays before I have deeply internalized an idea does not work for me.)

2. When I get excited about something, I articulate that as an “animating question.” In this post, it is, “How do I write good essays?” (Without that, the material is just a lump, and reading it feels like drifting.)

3. I collect my thoughts in a wild sprawling mess. I have one or two million words in my journals and notes: I surface the relevant parts and throw them into a shared document.

4. In this mess, I look for recurring topics and ideas. I rearrange the thoughts so that I get a few strong, separate ideas. Then I prune tangents that don’t fit those clusters.

5. I make a guess about what order to deal with the points. This is not a blueprint, but a prediction.

6. Without looking too much at my blueprint, I write the core part of the essay from “top to bottom.” I do not write an opening, nor an ending. I do not pick a narrative material—I let whatever occurs in the draft occur, for now.

7. I reread the draft and pay attention to any strong ideas or narratives that emerged organically. I strengthen them, and prune the weak ones. I move things around if it creates more movement or stronger centers.

8. Now, I write the opening and the end. The goal is to strengthen the whole and make it feel coherent.

9. I edit until I can’t find any more ways to improve it (or run out of time).

(Notice that this sequence describes creating essays—which are like amulets to me, encapsulating important insights, so I can return to them in my head, or reference them in conversations with friends. If I just want to think about something, I write in another way.)

Strategy and process is mostly a mistake when doing creative work

After I wrote the list above, I wanted to see what would happen if I systematically followed the process. That was 2 months ago. I have now written six essays using the process. To sum up the experience: that list of steps is a good first approximation of what works for me. It avoids many pitfalls that I typically fall into. But to honor the potential of the material I am working with I almost always have to break out of the process and get lost in the desert.

Having a method, a process, makes my writing more consistently good. This might sound like a win, but it is a problem. The usefulness and beauty of essays follow a power law, where the outliers create almost all the value—so if I make my essays more consistent, I remove not only the mistakes but also much of the upside. A method can, if used wisely, be a tool that helps you see possibilities. It can’t replace paying close attention to the material and figuring out what it is asking of you.

As I was exploring this, I kept a writing diary. What follows is ~3000 words of reflections based on those notes. (See also, “How I wrote ‘Looking for Alice.’”)

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From Giacometti’s sketch book

An earlier version of this essay was previously published in my waste book.

As some of you know, I have had a “secret” second blog called waste book for a little while. It is an experiment where I write about whatever is on my mind as fast as possible and then publish it without edits.

When I write on Escaping Flatland, I tend to be obsessive about researching and rewriting—I typically spend between 20 and 100 hours on a piece, spread over a few months. I think the conventional internet wisdom that quantity leads to quality is flawed. The deeper levels of insight and simplicity can only be reached by thinking in writing, questioning your assumptions, getting feedback, rewriting, and refactoring. If you are impatient, you miss almost all of the value of writing. I think doing a proper job is underrated.

But I also like to test my assumptions, so, without telling anyone, I spun up a new blog, and then, a few times a week, when I felt too tired to do “real” work, I wrung the last fifteen minutes out of myself by writing something for what I’ve come to call “my shit blog.” I’ve been surprised by how useful and interesting this turned out to be.

What has delighted me about the shit blog is how abundant it has made me feel. I sit down and type as fast as I can, and the results—well, they suck, but they don’t suck that much. They have a certain breeziness and some insights, too—insights of a different kind than I have in the serious essays. Which means I have underestimated my capacity! I can actually just sit down, without energy, without ideas, and if I frame the task in the right way, I can extract something of value from myself. The sense of scarcity I felt previously—feeling that to write the actual essays, I needed hours of high energy, which is scarce since we homeschool our kids, and I work, and the 2-year-old wakes up at night screaming, and feeling, because of this, that I needed to use my limited energy on good ideas—this feeling of scarcity has, I realize, kept me from doing more and better work.

The waste book has become a sort of writer’s diary / notebook where I talk process and sketch out new ideas in rough form. I don’t want too many people to read it, and it grew a bit faster than I wanted, so last week I decided to make it private. (But I’d happily add those of you who fund Escaping Flatland if you feel like witnessing the spectacle of Henrik thinking without editing himself. Just write a comment here or send me a direct message.)

I feel expansive inside when a constraint I used to live under has been removed. Yesterday, for example, I had a day of tasks back to back for twelve hours, and when it was done—and the kids were asleep—I felt, fuck, I haven’t written anything today, and fuck, how could I possibly do that now? And then I thought: well, of course, I can do it the way I do it on the shit blog; just sit down and type stuff without any expectations. So I walked around the farm for ten minutes and felt around for a way in and then I threw myself on the keyboard and typed hard for three hours.

And it was kind of good?

Another thing that happens when I have a shit blog is that I can burn through all the ideas that come into my head much faster, and take larger “risks.”

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