I think you really underrate your writing, though I think I write largely for the sound of my own voice, too.

I think what you said in your comment up there about not wanting to explain everything and to trust the reader is really interesting because I think your writing more than most any other place on the internet right now that I know of is the most honestly engaging stuff, that everything makes me think of something else and work to get through it, and that sort of consciousness makes ME want to be better because this just never occurs to me, I write pretty much to hear my own voice, and then I sit and read these books and can’t figure out why I’m not engaged by them when I’m not actively doing anything for myself.

“There should be a moment right here where in the darkness a young child tugs on my arm and tells me something simple and wise about “truth” and this would be a strong enough moment for me to hang an ending on, to finally finish this thing in a satisfying way.  I don’t remember any such moment, though, I just remember watching the screen and listening to the voice, and so I don’t know how to stitch all this together or what it means, I can’t seem to keep up the facade anymore.  This is the way it always seems to go for me as a writer, I build this mountain of rhetoric and then, when I finally get to the top of it, there’s nowhere left for me to go and I’m just stuck up here, alone and exhausted.  In the end, the strength of my emotion always outstrips my logic and language; the force of my hope blinds me from seeing my errors until it’s too late to correct them, until there’s no way back.  This is my fault as a writer and and rhetorician, probably, but it’s probably one of the only things that keeps me alive as a person, this overflowing of hope, this belief.  How else could you live now, in this time?  I’m as cynical and skeptical about politics as anybody but there are people out there right now who are saying that the president shouldn’t be able to talk over a television screen to kids in schools about how they should work hard and do their best, ordinary people saying this honestly and sincerely with a straight face that the president of our country should not be allowed to deliver a boring twelve minute address to kids at school, that this is a wrong thing.  These reports are exaggerated for effect by the parties and the media, just like the reports from the town halls, I know, these outliers don’t represent that many people, really, I know (I hope) but they do represent something, they do represent an idea, I think.

They represent, to me at least, the idea that there are people here in my country who don’t even want to try to learn anymore, that don’t even care about trying to read or hear or see something new and different and think about it and decide whether it’s good or bad or not, to weigh different sources against each other and find connections and correct untruths, people whose beliefs are so hardened and unbreakable that there’s no changing them no matter what and all they want to do is shout stupid and mean things as loud as they can.  Maybe there have always been people like this, people who don’t care about learning, but we live in a time where there’s more information and knowledge available to more people than at any other point in history and it’s so scary to me that there are people out there like this who couldn’t give a shit about any of it, that don’t care about trying, that don’t want to make things better, that seem to just want to fuck things up.  Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know.  When you’re reading novels in school, you’re taught that the best literature humanizes everyone, that there are no “black and white” characters but only “shades of gray,” that we are all human and these truths are self evident and et cetera, but you know, I see these people with their lies and their misinformation and all their bad faith and I don’t know how to make any of them someone I can understand and love and empathize with, however much I try.  Not that I’m some genius or saint, of course, not that I really know what the hell’s going on myself or what the solution is to anything that’s going on, obviously, but I’m trying to understand, at least, I’m doing what I can, and what everybody should be doing, genuine and honestly trying.  That’s why I’m glad for you, the person who is listening to this right now, reading these words, living in the world with me and sharing the experience.  You are out there, trying, and maybe because of it you can take these broken pieces of mine and put them together, can make them into something worth hoping for, something worth believing in.  I believe in you, if in nothing else.”

And I think on the one hand that ties together a lot of the threads and “explains” the essay in a way, but then I also feel that it’s too explicit about politics (a) and that it’s emotionally overheated in the hopes of being uplifting like a lot of my other big endings, a tic I am trying to get over (b) and I also feel like if I’m writing about trusting my reader to put together fragments and create meaning (i.e. that whitman quote) then I should, you know, let them without all that explaining crap at the end (c). I guess I wanted it to end quietly and without all the fireworks and stuff and while that’s the ending I want, I’m still not sure if that’s the better ending or if this is or something else. Probably won’t keep writing at it, though thanks for the advice.

2. Thanks a lot, and yeah, that Franzen thing was probably the most popular thing I’ve ever written, but, I just don’t know, I keep relating everything back to writing and reading and while those are of course fundamental actions to the world and fundamental things to me, I want to be able to write about something without always going meta and engaging those two things and I also think that move of, like, “Oh, well here are all these criticisms of Michael Pollan but…oh snap, no I really like Michael Pollan,” as being something tired for me personally and while if I can do it artfully, that’s fine, I have to find better ways to hide it.

3. Word.

2. But Critical Shopper was so good! Like, good good, regardless of my bias towards all things food-related. Thinking about it, I think it’s because the link between consuming words and consuming food is one with depths to plumb, and this topic, on rhetoric and novels and all that, is a little squishier and harder to write, particularly when using the tools in question rather than writing, say, a reference piece about the tools.

3. I always feel this way. Hazard of the trade?