Something …

Something in the way my brain thinks behoves me to start thinking differently … .

Just the other day I got a distinct feeling, which felt very much like what I imagine running full speed ahead head-first into a thick hard cement wall might feel like — and that gave me some pause.

I thought to myself: “Wait a second, something’s not right.”

I thought long and hard. I slept on it, and I was transported back to an experience I had a few decades ago. I can pinpoint that moment in time quite precisely — at least the date. I had just recently embarked on a career path that I felt was quite certainly leading to somewhere, but that was still a quite nebulous space. Yet at that time, my life was still more or less mired in uncertainty.

I don’t remember what precisely had precipitated it, but all of a sudden I found myself heading towards Tübingen to see and hear Susan Sonntag speak there. She had just won a prize and I drove there the night before and slept on a friend’s couch before attending her talk the next day.

To say that she simply spoke eloquently is a severe understatement. All who sat quietly to listen and hear every word, her every murmur and every single breath, and pause, and to capture each and every awe-inspiring glance, sat there in complete wonder, astonished and amazed by her presence which gave the entire room — a sizable auditorium — that warm, cozy feeling of “Gemütlichkeit”, which allowed her ideas to float around in the room like a bunch of cheerful, playful birds in the springtime, swooping in and out of her speech and also the questions and answers following.

I distinctly remember one particular point she made. She talked about one of her students who seemingly frustrated her. She mentioned how laboriously he would mention every minute detail in a story as if it were a long laundry list of details which needed to be checked off before the story could progress any further — since “otherwise the readers wouldn’t know those required things”. Ms. Sonntag was not happy with the resulting task of having to trudge through such long laundry lists of details just get to the next steps. She also explicitly stated how she felt it might be an entertaining (and liberating) game for the reader to actually use his or her own brain to fill in any such blank spaces in the canvas of a story which can unfold by engaging the reader to think a little bit, too.

I was reminded of this when this last week someone pointed out to me that they feel my approach is plagued with pedantry. I myself feel curiously willing to accept the argument that it was not intended as an insult, but rather as constructive criticism — that I need to work on this. I have a hunch that perhaps there’s an element of “we” need to work on it involved … insofar as I seem to have an urge to solve problems, yet I am not fixated on only my own solutions. The way I see it, one of the best ways to reduce my own pedantry is to become more aware of other proposals. I think it might also be fun to entertain rather fantastic ideas which at first glance might seem hardly plausible. Yet the prospect of a negative attitude such as “we’re all going to die anyways, so why bother?” just doesn’t cut it in my motivational wheelhouse.

So please: Hit me with your best shot!