Polytropy

When I learn things that might be worth remembering, and when I have thoughts that might be worth pursuing, it may be useful or convenient to type them up as here. I begin with the opening paragraph of the third of the 77 short chapters of W. Somerset Maugham’s book called The Summing Up (published in 1938 when Maugham was about 64):

In this book I am going to try to sort out my thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life. But such conclusions as I have come to have drifted about my mind like the wreckage of a foundered ship on a restless sea. It has seemed to me that if I set them down in some sort of order I should see for myself more distinctly what they really were and so might get some kind of coherence into them. I have long thought I should like to make such an attempt and more than once, when starting on a journey that was to last for several months, have determined to set about it. The opportunity seemed ideal. But I have always found that I was assailed by so many impressions, I saw so many strange things and met so many people who excited my fancy, that I had no time to reflect. The experience of the moment was so vivid that I could not attune my mind to introspection.

(The title of this entry is the one given by WordPress to the example or template that is supplied to the new blogger.)

Added September 21, 2023. Since I have found it convenient for every post to have at least one picture, here’s one of me.

I think this post continues to be an accurate description of the blog. It could be added that a lot of what I think about here is what other people say. They could have the more-or-less famous names that I have assigned to “categories” of posts here, or they could be the essayists (in the broadest sense) whose work has come to me through Twitter or some other social medium. One such essayist is Yasmin Nair, who complains in “Lyrical Doughnuts or, the ‘I’ in Writing” (May 26, 2023),

too many writers today, especially those hoping to make it as writahs … rely too much on personal experiences and responses to impel their writing. The “I” has become an easy way for writers to create work quickly, to pound out that Friday evening piece for subscribers. But it has become a dreadful bore, and created a corpus of work that relies on us supposedly connecting to a writer rather than actually learning or experiencing anything new in their writing.

To impel my own writing, I rely on other writers, such as Maugham, Collingwood, Aristotle, or Yasmin Nair. The reader may have their own judgment of those writers, so as to be able to check their understanding against mine. Nair continues:

Some of this has to do with pedagogical traditions, especially in the United States. Americans are more likely to be encouraged to begin writing by crafting personal essays and students are often validated for revealing their inner selves: consider the pernicious rise of the college application letter …

The application for St John’s College required several essays, but one of them was to be about the applicant’s experience with books. Students at the College would develop their own ideas, but about books that everybody else was reading too.