Up in Ontario

A Writing Life on the Brain

Courtesy of a link from the excellent writing and publishing blog BookNinja I came across an article called Writing on the Brain by Joseph Epstein from Commentary Magazine. I've read and enjoyed a few articles and books written by Epstein before and this article is in many ways superior to what I had already liked.

The article starts out as a review of The Midnight Disease by Dr. Alice W. Flaherty, a recently published book that approaches the human urge to write from a scientific perspective. But to call Writing on the Brain a book review is to represent it at a discount (based on the nine-parts summary, one-part analysis practice currently employed in book reviewing); it is akin to calling the Titanic a big boat that sunk. Epstein takes up reviewing The Midnight Disease with enthusiasm and engagement and churns out an essay rich in digressions, opinions and analysis, drawn from his life as a writer.

Some prime excerpts from Epstein are the following:

"Reading the New York Times Book Review every week," Dr. Flaherty notes, "was a major part of my literary education"—a statement akin to claiming that one has learned how to fly by reading Superman comics.

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"Science," she suggests, "is the mouthpiece of determinism, and literature the last holdout of free will." Safe to say that neuroscience these days holds brain chemistry and anatomy to be more decisive for human behavior and the formation of character than free will, whereas every serious writer will be firmly on the other side. Of course, whether neuroscience acknowledges even the existence of free will is another question, and one that Flaherty explicitly declines to adjudicate on behalf of neuroscience. Writers, of course, must come down on the side of free will. What, you might say, choice have we? Without free will there would be no literature in the first place: no drama, no insights into human nature, little, really, but the drab playing-out of the hands we have been dealt, with the aid of pills to bolster our lagging spirits. Artists are the natural opponents of determinism—which is why, for example, so many of them have mocked the heavily deterministic doctrines of Sigmund Freud.

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Once one has achieved a relative mastery over one’s craft, the pleasures of composition are like few others: certainly none that I have known. Constructing well-made sentences, in which words and thought appear to make a seamless fit, causing the small but intense light of insight to click on, can only be compared, I should imagine, to the delight of dancing faultlessly to one’s own choreography.

Available in HTML, PDF or plain text for printing, I recommend you print, read and save the essay. I read it on screen and found that some of the acute points of Epstein's writing were lost due to the tendency to skip words and phrases when reading pixels. Now I have printed it and will file it away with other keepers, to be revisited once someone makes a columnist out of me.