A friend of mine really shocked me when he said that, assuming I live a long and happy life, I’m only going to read about 700 more books, assuming I chug along at the hearty rate of about 30 books per year. That’s shockingly low.
And I’m writing books. How can I ask fellow human beings to make one of my books one of the chosen few they will read in the course of their lifetimes? Elsewhere, I will share my answers to this question.
But I think we need to continue discussing what it means to feel like we have something to say in a deeply media- and information-saturated world.
I have a suspicion.
It relates to a broader framework of participation in globalized, information-saturated, over-mediated culture. The gist of it is — internal order and disorder are reflected externally. It’s derived from J. Krishnamurthi and Marianne Williamson and, broadly speaking, it’s the idea that the world is shaped by our mental states.
I can feel the counter-argument. This is solipsistic. It can be refuted in the famous way that Samuel Johnson refuted Bishop X’s assertion that the world is not real. He kicked a rock and said, “I refute it, thus.”
However, after a lot of reality-testing of this idea, it’s crystallized in me, in this way:
1) Order and beauty and wonder and love exist in this world.
2) Injustice, disorder, wrongness, and profound iniquities exist in this world.
Depending on one’s internal state, we can over-attach to 1) or over-attach to 2).
However, in a state of non-attachment, we’re able to see that 1) and 2) are both true. That contradiction is inherent to our existence.
For me, then writing in a mediated culture is about rearranging my internal landscape. Am I saying I am a writer who writes for myself? No. I write for others, too. But if they aren’t going to listen, I’m not going to lose my head over it.
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