The other part of writing

 I have been trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

E.B. White got at the idea with this line: “Writing is an act of faith not a trick of grammar.”

I think we tend to start projects before we find the foundations. We teach people the craft of writing without spending much time helping them find what it is they have to say.

But this idea is fuzzy. I haven’t been able to get a wrench on it, as my grandfather would say.

The best I can do now is to give a bad example, to cite a case where things went wrong.

The best teller of this tale is Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau’s biographer from an earlier era. In Thoreau’s day, English Composition was a continuing course, rather than something to be endured in your freshman year. The course was heavily weighted. Perhaps the point of college was to learn to express yourself.

When Thoreau went to Harvard, he was taught English Composition by Edward Tyrrell Channing, described by Canby as “a first-rate teacher of rhetoric who made or marred more important writers than any other American professor.”

Channing’s students included Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Charles Sumner and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Thoreau had good marks at Harvard except in English Composition.

Channing taught the craft of writing as it was practiced. He demanded a logical, orderly exposition. Consider the order and logical structure of Thoreau’s great works and you’ll see the problem. A basic Thoreau story is about a week on the water or a saunter on Cape Cod. He gives us a narrative of an excursion, with insights that seem to grow out of the material naturally, almost as if they were growing out of the landscape. He doesn’t chop the insights up, organize them into topics, and present them in some kind of order. As Canby put it:

 

If any man alive could have taught Thoreau to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, it was Channing, but he failed. 

 

Here’s Canby on the effect on Thoreau:

 

Harvard made a scholar out of him but nearly ruined him as a writer. It took him approximately ten years to put his Harvard rhetoric behind him, and write steadily on his own.

 

Canby does not make Channing the villain. In academia, professors make judgments about grades. In the less real world of journalism, editors make judgments about employment.

I’m not thinking about blame. But something is wrong when Thoreau can’t get near the top of a writing class.

The problem is that our notion of writing is not complete, I suspect. What we say about craft might be logical, but logical systems that don’t account for all the facts aren’t complete and are thus not sound. A wise person doesn’t ignore facts to preserve some system, no matter how elegant that system might be.

To me, the part of writing that is most interesting is the part before you get to the question of craft. I wish I understood it better.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 53 and 54.

Browsing

 The essayist Alice Bolin, at 13, ran across The Book of Unusual Quotations, compiled by Rudolf Flesch. She read by topic. She was religious, so she read a lot of quotations about “Christianity,” “church” and “belief.”

She said she used the book as an oracle or prayerbook. That is, she read with the attitude that whatever she needed would be given to her. She called it “evidence of the way a mind is built — randomly, piece by piece, working slowly through the dark with the few truths one finds or has been given.”

Bolin is not the first to suggest that we humans form our minds by collecting information, examples and many other things. But it’s hard to beat her account.

Bolin points out that children do that. They know they don’t know everything, are comfortable in not knowing, are delighted when they find something they can use — a piece of the puzzle that helps them see a larger picture.

I am interested in the philosophy of mind and wish that philosophers would pry themselves away from the sizzling topic of artificial intelligence and look at the humble topic of browsing. Some of us love to browse the stacks in the library with no purpose, open to just about anything, following our own interests.

I would love to read a paper on what we’re doing when we browse. Are we doing something similar when we make a collection, as when we collect quotations in a notebook?

• Source: Alice Bolin, “The Methodless Method”; The New Yorker, March 25, 2013. 

The public understanding of religion

 It seems to me that philosophers who are interested in religion usually skip the question of what religion is. The tendency is to start with the concept of God and the attributes of divinity.

I think that’s an unfortunate place to start. I’d like to better understand what religion is and what people are doing when they practice religion.

The Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion has a series of talks called “Why This Text Matters.” In each, a scholar talks about a book that has been a foundation for scholars studying religion.

I’m not sure that’s the best way of getting to a better idea of what religion is. But it is one way.

I started with Professor Richard Miller’s lecture on “Augustine’s Confessions.”

• Source: Professor Miller’s talk is here:

https://martycenter.org/series/why-this-text-matters/augustines-confessions-richard-miller

The Marty Center is part of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. I’m glad some institution is concerned about the public understanding of religion.

How we look at history

 Albert Szent-Györgyi, the subject of yesterday’s note, was a biochemist, but he thought history was the most important subject.

He was not interested in national histories.

 

But what is world history? In its essence it is the story of man, how he rose from his animal status to his present elevation. This is a fascinating story and is linked to a limited number of creative men, its heroes, who created new knowledge, new moral or ethical values, or new beauty. Opposing this positive side of history there is a negative, destructive side linked to the names of kings, barons, generals, and dictators who, with their greed and lust for power, made wars, fought battles, and mostly created misery, destroying what other men had built. These are the heroes of the history we teach at present as world history. Not only is this history negative and lopsided, it is false, too, for it omits the lice, rats, malnutrition, and epidemics which had more to do with the course of things than generals and kings, as Zinsser ably pointed out.

 

We tend to lose our most important stories chasing news about the crackpot of the day. Szent-Györgyi, a Hungarian, saw his country fall under the sway of crackpot strongmen. The first bunch admired Hitler, while the second admired Stalin.

Szent-Györgyi knew the destructive side of history. In the 1930s, he helped Jewish colleagues escape and got out himself.

The reference in the last sentence is to Hans Zinsser, an American bacteriologist who worked on typhus and who wrote Rats, Lice and History.

Zinsser was another of those scientific thinkers that might interest students of literature. Zinsser’s autobiography was As I Remember Him: The Biography of R.S. It’s a third-person account of R.S., his Romantic Self. It’s on the long list of books I want to read.

• Source: Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Teaching and Expanding Knowledge”; Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 24-8. It’s here:

https://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1965/03/teaching-and-the-expanding-knowledge

A Nobel winner on education

 Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize in 1937 for his work on Vitamin C. But his mind sauntered beyond the fields of biochemistry. He was interested in how people learn, and he thought that education got off to a bad start with its attitude toward books, which he called the main instrument of teaching.

There is a widely spread misconception about the nature of books which contain knowledge. It is thought that such books are something the contents of which have to be crammed into our heads. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. Books are there to keep the knowledge in while we use our heads for something better. Books may also be a better place for such knowledge. In my own head any book-knowledge has a half-life of a few weeks. So I leave knowledge, for safe-keeping, to books and libraries and go fishing, sometimes for fish, sometimes for new knowledge.

 

In my head, the half-life of book knowledge is considerably shorter. But sometimes a book will prompt a chain of thought. Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoire made me think of other scientists who had interesting — and surprising — qualities of mind.

• Source and note: Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Teaching and Expanding Knowledge”; Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 24-8. It’s here:

https://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1965/03/teaching-and-the-expanding-knowledge

This line of thought began with “Thinking, technique and writing,” Aug. 11, 2026. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/thinking-technique-and-writing.html

Spittlebugs

 I’ve been pulling gripeweed in the garden — alternately admiring and cussing Phyllanthus urinaria. Among my finds are the lairs of spittlebugs, in subfamily Aphrophorinae.

The subfamily is in Hemiptera, the true bugs. Each has a mouth that looks like a hypodermic needle. These bugs pierce a plant and suck the fluids.

The common name comes from the nymphs, who hide and shelter in a blob that reminds most people of spit. It’s a combination of urine, air bubbles and adhesives. Bugs go through incredible volumes of fluids while feeding and, as you might guess, produce prodigious quantities of liquid waste. The relatively defenseless nymphs use what they have to make shelters.

Adult spittlebugs are not defenseless. They’re called froghoppers, at least in the South. The experts say these bugs can leap 100 times their length, which seems about right to me. The adult froghoppers I’ve seen are less than half an inch long. One might hop 4 feet to escape a bird.

• For more on the aggressive weed, see “On gripeweed, with awe,” June 30, 2026.

Thinking, technique and writing

 Science is a way of thinking.

There are many ways. In ancient Greece, some people who were intrigued by a question consulted oracles. Some listened for whispered voices as the wind rustled the leaves in a sacred grove. Some, like Herodotus and Aristotle, went to look for themselves. They spoke of making inquiries and investigations.

Our sciences grew out of that impulse to observe and make a record of our observations. If you’re a scientist, you subscribe to that way of thinking. You subscribe to certain habits, routines and systems. You look for answers in a certain way because you frame questions in a certain way.

Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoir reminded me of those rare moments in college when my teachers talked — not about a research project, techniques, analytical tools or a discipline — but what it was to be a scientist, what it’s like spending a life thinking in a certain way.

I enjoy the writings of scientists who take a stab at that topic.

Many writers have tried to do something similar for people who write. My list would include Annie Dillard, William and Kim Stafford, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Virginia Woolf and Rainer Maria Rilke.

As in the sciences, technique is vital. But it seems to me that questions about technique and craftsman follow more basic questions. I think it makes sense to talk about an attitude toward writing or an approach to writing — and how approaching things in different ways could lead to different practices of writing.

Craftsmanship is vital. But I don’t think it’s the place to start. We need to go elsewhere to find the first lesson.