Why We Write

Just for a minute, attempt to stop thinking. Let your mind momentarily forget about your extensive to-do list, the constant itch of your shirt tag, or what you should have for dinner tonight. Simply cease your train of thought and be. Most of you reading will find this difficult as I did when I sat down to write this blog post. In an age where time seems to slip away faster due to the increasing busyness of the world, pausing to allow our minds to breathe in the present somehow makes us more restless. How often do we grant ourselves the space to think about things outside of superficiality? I do not mean to mitigate the woes of daily life as unworthy of attention—the Post-it Note with my schoolwork checklist looms over my shoulder as I type. Rather, the thoughts I refer to are the thoughts and feelings which pertain to, well, ourselves. The larger question I seek to answer is, how often do we grant ourselves the room to feel? I cringe slightly at my own words because I recognize what a pretentious question I’ve just proposed. We feel something every second of the day whether we realize it or not. Yet, how many times do we attach it with a name and explore it? I recently read William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating” and was particularly struck by his ability to do precisely this: be with the feeling of hate, navigate the nature of it, and ponder how it applies to him. Hazlitt’s wonderfully uninhibited essay dissects the essence of hate and its eternal vitality. In a long-winded but sincere soliloquy of sorts, he concludes, “Have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough,” (Hazlitt). After framing a spider as a valiant protagonist, highlighting the underlying hatred of religion and patriotism, and making a jab at Shakespeare, how on earth did he reach this resolution?

He wrote.

At its core, writing is the genuine attempt of self-understanding and a means of examining why we think the way we do. By connecting our feelings to words, language defines those thoughts. Writing freezes those hard-to-articulate emotions in a time capsule which can be communicated to a later audience. Or not—some writers write solely for themselves like Hazlitt (and that’s okay, too!). However, for those of us who care to listen, Hazlitt’s writing provokes us to question our own experiences with hate and compare them with his. Therefore, writing not only acts as a means of clarification for the writer themselves, but writing contributes an idea to a larger conversation. Perhaps even more intriguing, this conversation transcends time and space as we read works from before our lifetime. Thus, we ultimately engage a wider community in a discourse that perhaps continues for centuries (take any text on the meaning of life, for example). So, when writing presents us with the opportunity to become time-manipulators and time-travelers of a unique variety, wouldn’t we all seize it?