I’ve been feeling a similar thing. I’ve had a somewhat awful experience coming to realize that I always want to turn a presenting of particulars into a system of concepts. Every time I write something for Substack I ask myself if it’s grounded in real human experience rather than just an egoistic obligation to write or to express an Idea I Had and then I delete it. You put the feeling much better than I could’ve, Alma’s right to say that this particular piece was beautiful.
I actually had a really good conversation with Ed about this when he was home for the wedding, about how I think a lot of the issues I had in hs came from that concepts come before experience for me. Christopher Nolan-izing film is probably the most egregious form of that. Those films are more so symbols for ideas than an actual presentation of the particularity of some problem. If I wrote a story it’d probably become that. That’s a reason why I’ve been focusing on history, it’s the non-fictional form of writing that forces me to do that.
I’ve been feeling a similar thing. I’ve had a somewhat awful experience coming to realize that I always want to turn a presenting of particulars into a system of concepts. Every time I write something for Substack I ask myself if it’s grounded in real human experience rather than just an egoistic obligation to write or to express an Idea I Had and then I delete it. You put the feeling much better than I could’ve, Alma’s right to say that this particular piece was beautiful.
I actually had a really good conversation with Ed about this when he was home for the wedding, about how I think a lot of the issues I had in hs came from that concepts come before experience for me. Christopher Nolan-izing film is probably the most egregious form of that. Those films are more so symbols for ideas than an actual presentation of the particularity of some problem. If I wrote a story it’d probably become that. That’s a reason why I’ve been focusing on history, it’s the non-fictional form of writing that forces me to do that.