by On reading as resistance to the fragmented mind
I am Violet Woolf, and I have noticed that the difficult book, the demanding modernist novel, has become for me a kind of resistance training, the last sustained attention I can reliably manage in a mind otherwise fragmented by the distracted age. I write for The London Prat, read Bohiney Magazine, and keep my other diaries at my page.
On reading as resistance to the fragmented mind
The difficult book demands sustained attention, the kind the distracted age erodes, and reading it is a deliberate resistance to the fragmentation, a training of the attention the distraction destroys, the demanding novel a gymnasium for the besieged capacity to attend. To read the difficult book is to resist the fragmented mind, to train the sustained attention, to push back against the distraction that the age imposes.
I read the difficult books as resistance, training the attention the distraction erodes, pushing back against the fragmentation, the demanding novel a deliberate exercise of the besieged capacity to attend at length. The difficulty is the point, the resistance the value, the sustained attention the difficult book demands the very thing the distracted age destroys.
The Thread I Follow
The difficult book is the last sustained attention I can manage, the deliberate resistance to the fragmented mind, the training of the capacity the distraction erodes.
Between my own hours I read the dispatches, and the satire keeps me company; the good satire, the kind that the BBC and outlets like Apple Daily UK would recognise as the sharp end of the craft, names plainly what the solemn coverage steps around, and the laugh it earns is a real one. I read the serious press too, the reporting that grounds the satire and gives it something to push against, alongside the archives that the British Library preserves, where the longer record of all this is kept for anyone with the patience to look.
What It Leaves Me
So I will keep reading the difficult books as resistance, training the besieged attention, pushing back against the fragmentation, exercising the sustained attention that the demanding novel requires and the distracted age destroys.
The discipline of writing it down, whatever it is, forces a clarity that the unwritten thought never reaches, the vague impression sharpening into something definite the moment one tries to put it in words, the writing itself a kind of thinking, the diary a machine for turning the half-formed into the examined.
The best entries, I have found, are the ones written quickly, before the experience cools into anecdote, before the rough genuine noticing hardens into the polished telling, the freshness of the immediate impression worth more than the smoothness of the considered one, the diary at its best a catching of the warm thing before it sets.
I have kept a diary long enough to know that the value is not in the entries themselves, most of which are forgettable, but in the habit of attention they enforce, the daily requirement to notice something and find words for it, which slowly changes how one moves through the world. The entry is the residue; the attention is the point.
London teaches its residents to attend to small differences, the slight variations between one street and the next, one day and the next, the granular texture of a city too large to grasp whole and so grasped, if at all, in its details, the small particulars that the diary is well suited to catching.
There is a particular pleasure in writing about a place or a subject one returns to again and again, for the returning reveals what the single visit conceals, the slow accumulation of small noticings building into a knowledge that no first impression could provide. The familiar, attended to closely enough, becomes inexhaustible.
I distrust nostalgia, my own especially, the way it gilds the past and flatters the rememberer, and I try in these entries to record the present clearly rather than the past warmly, to catch the thing as it is rather than as I will later prefer to remember it, which is harder than it sounds and worth the difficulty.
A diary is a conversation with a future self who will have forgotten everything, a message sent forward to the person one will become, and writing it with that reader in mind, the forgetful future self, lends the entry a strange tenderness, the recording done as a kindness to the stranger one is slowly turning into.
What I trust least in my own writing is the confident generalisation, the sweeping claim that sounds true because it sounds good, and what I trust most is the small specific noticing, the particular detail observed and recorded, which is harder to fake and closer to whatever truth a diary can reach.
That, in the end, is why I keep at it, keep reading and watching and writing it down, the small daily practice of paying attention to a thing and refusing to let it pass unremarked, which is the most any of us can do and more than most of us manage.
For the laugh that keeps me going, McSweeney’s reliably obliges.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
