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Shadows | Jan 02 2002

The way I write is like this: I sit at my desk, at my computer, and think of what to say. When I think of something that seems half-right or half-interesting, a half-right or half-interesting thing to say, I type it into the computer, and then after typing it, I read it over and think about it. Sometimes I go back to the previous sentence or the beginning of the paragraph or even to the previous page and read what I wrote and think about it. This happens over and over. And along the way, at various junctures, I change things, then change things again, until I can’t think of anything else to change. The thing I write in the end, the thing I am left with, is sometimes revealing of something—sometimes, sometimes not—but it is never, I don’t think, what it pretends to be.

Thoughts, said Nietzsche, are shadows of our feelings: always darker, emptier, and simpler than these. And the written word, it strikes me, is a shadow of our thoughts.

I’ve been working on this piece for nearly an hour now, writing a clause or two, thinking about it, writing another, going back and changing what I’ve written, moving things around, deleting, deleting, deleting… How long did it take you to read it? Two minutes? How different it would seem if we were talking. For it appears, reading back, that I have a certain point in mind and am taking the shortest route available to making that point, when in fact I’ve been discovering things as I’ve gone, not knowing what I would find.