I do my best critical thinking when I’m out for a walk by myself. I have to say, that’s been one of the best things about living in the PNW: There’s always a nice long, beautiful walk to be had.
They leave me full of grace and sunshine, even in the rain.
Walking helps me work out complicated problems, but it also inspires conscious realizations of things—ideas, meanings, problems, and connections—I hadn’t realized I’d been subconsciously processing (Turns out, it's science!).
I was on a walk yesterday when one such realization flashed across my mind:
Writing is the documentation of thought.
It’s ironic that now I am writing the thought down.
But then I realized; it’s not just the documentation of thought, it’s also the documentation of thought formation.
Writers will tell you there’s magic in finding your way to an opinion or a conclusion on the page, vis-a-vis the physical process of writing.
And some kinds of literature revel and play in this space.
Stream of consciousness (my favorite literary style) explores the process of being in the world as a meditation on how the banalities of day-to-day life spark past remembrances—usually several key memories in our lives.
Writing is the documentation of thought formation.
Thoughts often flutter erratically, like butterflies in summer. Writing requires an inordinate amount of discipline and a small drop, if any, of inspiration.
Hungarian philosopher and iconic literary theorist Georg Lukács explores individual consciousness, objectified meaning, and the role of forms of writing in his 1916 masterpiece, The Theory of the Novel.
I bring it up because he argues that the form of the novel allows individuals to transcend the totality of their time.
What’s that mean?
The time in which we live creates subjectivity—but it is so all-encompassing, it feels objective.
Our contributions to the world of the future are limited to the social constructions of our time.
Ancient Greeks could’ve no more composed epic poems about the iPhone than the great thinkers of today can diatribe against zoning regulations on Jupiter (if we get there).
Temporality creates limitations, yet—and here’s the beautiful part—the human experience is eternal. Objective. And we know this because of writing.
Writing is the documentation of thought formation to create a relationship.
For Lukács, the realistic novel presented a golden ticket to “open totality”; to experience having that same old human spirit within potentially endless subjective temporalities.
But the temporal isn’t just external. It’s also internal, inclusive of changes in our mental states throughout life and experiences.
And capturing that is what modernist writers have been dedicating their lives to for generations: A million shades of the truth about being alive.
Why?
To overcome the very alienation we seek to describe through the medium of writing—fiction or not.
People are social animals, but writing to document thought formation is more than having nowhere to be on a Friday night.
We don’t just want the thought out there.
We want to connect on the genesis of the idea; on the essence of why and the process of how we get to the how; because the act of having a quiet thought alone, unshared, when it’s core to who you are, is perhaps the loneliest feeling of all.
Writing is the documentation of thought formation to create a relationship between our inner and physical worlds.
To meld our inner lives to the world around us. To feel a part of the essence of it all—especially if we don’t feel connected to the tenets of our time.
Perhaps it’s the journey of arriving at a thought, an opinion, an ending that creates the glue we’re after.
The search for shared experiences and feelings can rank them as objective, but only if we pick up the pen to write about them.
Not a writer? I have good news: You can read all the thought documentation you like.
After all, without reading, there’d be no relationship, and we very well may still be stuck carving cuneiform in pre-3300 BC.
I don’t know about you, but my handwriting is bad enough.
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