Thinking fast and slow, Reading fast and slow. Writing fast and slow.
Each of these approaches has benefits and each has limitations.
What follows is a response I wrote to a question I was asked on Quora.com. I gave myself 20 minutes from question to post:
What is the most
important of Oscar Wilde’s characteristics?
Long before the culture wars, long
before the redefinition of gender, long before new historicism, Wilde knew that
the essence of Man was, of course, the surface. He understood that paradox is
the soul of wit, and understood that the urbane exchange of words displays the
Shakespearean soul’s dark side too. That the brevity of the witty soul isn’t
the same as the soul of wit, but old fools could say such things, and yet while
Wilde lived, his lightning flashes of words were rapier like and so scored
‘palpable hits’ as much as did dear Hamlet, but with far less angst, acts
and world-weary lines.
If I had to sum this up quickly I’d say he understood what many these days call performativity. When Greenblatt and others started talking about Renaissance self-fashioning they underscored the way our natures are not deep. As Carlyle said in Sartor Resartus, clothes make the man. For Wilde, his clothes, gaudy as they often were, were secondary to the way he clothed himself in words. His words slipped under and through and around, made us smile and sold well, but beyond this he was speaking of how gender and sexual identity is fluid too. He was speaking of how the lives we lead are largely imitations of the arts and sciences we had imbibed as truth whether this was the bible or Darwin or anything else. We are, Wilde knew, what Huizinga would say much later: Homo Ludens. The human is the play we play. The play is the thing in the game of life so here Wilde knew, before Wittgenstein, that language games construct and constrict us both. He knew that fairy tales contain deep truths long before “the uses of enchantment” made its mark. He knew, but could not say in English, de profundus wasn’t. The dark night of the soul was not a role he could carry off for long. He knew the phrase ‘hypocritical morality’ is redundant. We perform the roles, some better than others, some to good reviews, by ourselves or by others, but at the end it’s hard to know that there will be no curtain call, no new party quips that outshone the humdrum strum of a broken heart, oh beastly bad cliché, brought down brought low by the usual clichés. Wilde lived his own version of Moulin Rouge, a laughing tragedy of love that sings popular songs and gathers operatic and pop rosebuds, high and low, that the postmod crowd claimed was theirs. He lives in his quotes but his gifts have changed art and so lives and so our hearts and minds and eyes. Bravo. Fine performance.
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After posting this entry I was lucky enough to receive some supportive
votes from some wonderful and smart people. But one comment indicated to me
that I might have, though the process of squeezing in as much as I could Ito a
short essay, written a few things that communicated well to another Wilde
reader.
"Parke: I know a bit about English and
Irish literature, and about the art and practice of literary criticism. I
must say I've learned more from your brief post than I have from most of my
long-ago literature classes. Thank you for writing this. I hope you
have students who deserve you!"
I know this shameless bit of self-promotion is gauche. I put it here to
underscore one of the paradoxes about writing; while I often try to labor slowly over the words I use in emails and blog posts and responses , rarely do I get a response such as this. In fact, often times my
long labors over words come out clunkier and less effective than the ones I wrote
so quickly, and, at that moment, almost effortlessly. In this case, the constraints of very limited
time helped.
Does this response mean that I should always rush through my writing,
effectively cutting out any self-censorship or self-doubt? No, but it does tell
me that practicing speedwriting can help me with all my efforts if I take the
good from it.
In a previous entry, I asked people to try this way of speed writing, to
sprint through words and skip past the endless delays we can create when a long
horizon of time stretches before us. Now a new book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, gives some of the
science behind why deadlines can help us focus. That’s the good news. On the other
hand, focus can also lead to what the authors call tunneling- entering a narrow
cave in which all sorts of useful things might get missed.
Once again, life works well sometimes at one extreme, sometimes at
another and sometimes somewhere along the continuum of spots of time in between.
Sometimes we need to focus and thus accept the tunnel. Sometimes we need the
long marathon of time and effort to organize and carry through a creative project.
What I call sprint or speed essays
take place under rigid time constraints--the way an essay must be written under
exam or SAT constraints. There is not much time to place words together
placidly into a perfect order--no Flaubertian ‘mot just;’ instead, a 'deluging
onwardness' that creates a rush of words. This rush can be a garble or a
marvel, or a little of both.
For first drafts, sprint writing seems useful as
words then are formed and brought into existence; afterward, the spaces in
between thoughts and images can be deleted or added to or filled in. Part of what makes the difference between a
good and bad sprint essay is the training that goes in beforehand. For example,
it does not take scientific studies to know that studying helps people write
good exam essays. Having knowledge of the subject matter can, at times, put us
in zone when all that exists are the flow of words. The sound of a train
passing by outside goes unnoticed. The cough of a classmate or the blinks of a
cell phone don’t exist. Sprint writing can help with focus, a skill that helps
in many ways in life. But in the tunnel, unsupported generalizations, contradictions,
missed punctuation often make a guest appearance or even worse can take on a
starring role. Instead of setting a
record for the fastest movement of mind the essay gets stuck in a sludge of
simplistic superficialities. But for
those who have ever competed in the real world of sprints there is almost
nothing like the rush of body and mind whirring into a blur that ends with a
finish that gets posted as worthy of note.
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Questions:
Yesterday, I posted a much different approach to a Wilde essay. The
mixture of fonts, quotes, intertextuality and other creative non-fiction techniques
had to have been the result of hours of gathering combining and cutting and
pasting. Is this essay ‘deeper’ than
this one? Does the metaphor of depth serve readers well when evaluating a text?
Why or why not?
Rate the essay above from 1-5 with 5 being the best. What rating did you
give it and why?
Does this essay seem complete or more like a draft? Support your answer.
Do the Shakespearean references add to the text? Why or why not?
Do you believe “all the world’s a stage and we are but players in it?”
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