Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions

by Evan Puschak

Reading Emerson was like watching magic. Somehow he was able to retrieve the cloudy, half-formed thoughts in my mind and write them down with astonishing eloquence—a century and a half before I was born! This is the magic of articulation, of putting things exactly right, and it’s been the basic obsession of all my work since that afternoon in Barnes & Noble. You know the experience I’m talking about: someone phrases something perfectly and an idea that’s been a fog in the background of your mind suddenly solidifies. A lot of the time we aren’t fully aware of our thoughts and opinions, so when another person articulates one, it feels strange, like a surprise coming from within. Often it makes us laugh—something all stand-up comedians depend on. Their job is to articulate our opinions in clever ways, to evoke that startling laughter of recognition. The best comedians take the vaguest, most universal musings and sharpen them to a fine point. Emerson does the same.

I will be obsessing over articulation now.

From Emerson, I learned two fundamental truths: first, that we learn by expressing, not by thinking, which is to say that knowledge doesn’t really exist until you can write it down. What we normally imagine as “thinking” is really just a distracted form of writing, like having a disoriented drunk at a typewriter behind your eyes. Writing sobers him up. The pen (or the word processor) lets the mind compose language into knowledge that’s far more sophisticated than what that little boozer can do on his own.

This is why I’ll keep writing.

Emerson doesn’t discourage the reading of past masters, but he does warn against taking what we read—even from the most respected, even from him—on faith. The purpose of books, he says, is to inspire our own ideas, not to demand fealty to theirs. Even genius can be harmful if it over-influences, if I am knocked “clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.” Emerson wants to protect the individual’s trust in her own genius, her own capacity to uncover the world’s secrets. Books and the institutions that teach them are indispensable tools, but they serve us best “when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”

Powerful paragraph and a new idea I’ll dive into more. Be a system, not a satellite.

With all that info, I was able to categorize our reaction to the Cats trailer alongside similar reactions to Sonic the Hedgehog and Aladdin, but with subtle variations due to its proximity to theater culture. As time went on, I’d be able to refine that judgment. The internet’s feelings are complex, but not infinitely varied. The more you consume the flows of tweets, videos, articles, comments, the easier it gets to bracket that complexity and understand its outer limits. And when you understand what the internet thinks, you understand what it’s okay to say. And when you understand what it’s okay to say, you can add your part to the symphony, you can collect your likes, you can smother incompatible views. Or you can just watch. And let the internet flow through you. And let the internet become you.

Damn

The invention of languages is the foundation [of The Lord of the Rings and other tales of Middle-earth]. The “stories” were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows… [The Lord of the Rings] is to me, anyway, largely an essay in “linguistic aesthetic,” as I sometimes say to people who ask me “what is it all about?”

So cool

For the keen escapist, Middle-earth is the premier destination. It never breaks the illusion. Every river and ruin, every poem and sword, every place the Fellowship alights on its journey through the story can be traced back ages to the earliest days of the world—and even before that, to the moment of divine creation by Eru Ilúvatar, the supreme being of this universe. It’s all infused with a feeling of deep history, and the effect of that on the reader (at least the effect on this reader) is overwhelmingly immersive.

Well said

That’s a feature of global capitalism: the implication of everyone in a great number of morally messy activities.

As Will Durant said, “we are what we repeatedly do,” and what we do the most are the trivial things, the things we don’t think twice about, the things our nature prompts us to do, the things society gives us tacit permission to do.

It wasn’t until week five of writing my novel that I had a good day. By then I had discovered a few things: that I was a poor writer, and not just a poor writer but a worthless person, and not just a worthless person but a despicable one. I discovered these things several times every day, always in that order. My work rang false, I learned, because I had nothing to say, and I had nothing to say because I had little interest in actually writing, only in being a writer. I wanted to be a writer because I was vain, attention-starved, and at the core of me was a black hole where a soul ought to be.

This.

There’s that famous quote by Ira Glass about beginners: “For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

My taste probably isn’t killer but I love this sentiment anyway.

My early books may be crap, but writing them had an immense impact. Learning the dynamics of my mood enabled every success I’ve had in work and life. When I feel good, I exploit the feeling for all it’s worth. When I feel like shit, I batten down the hatches and hold on to my confidence that it will pass. That’s so important because it keeps me from changing course during a bad spell, from being tossed in the winds of my attitude. If every bad day resulted in a deconstruction of values and priorities, I’d never make headway on a worthwhile project.

Stay the course.