Moods and Writing

Over the years, I have paid very little attention to Montaigne’s short 10th essay “On a Ready or Hesitant Delivery,” and I think that’s unfortunate. For one, it’s the only essay that begins with a quote from Etienne de la Boetie:

Never to all men were all graces given.

The essay is an admission that Montaigne is not terribly eloquent, that his words often do not flow without prompting. This is not an issue for me. If anything, words in the moment often come too easily for me, I have to constrain myself from jumping into conversations with words that are bursting to come out.

When I was a much younger man, I would often eavesdrop on others’ conversations and join in, to their surprise and mine. Fortunately, there are fewer natural gathering places in the world these days and those that exist usually have such loud music, so I cannot hear sidebar conversations as well as I once did. Often I have no idea where my thoughts are coming from, they seem more an organic expression of the moment than anything I’ve conceived and decided to share.

Montaigne also describes an experience that I have often. I do not know where my thoughts are coming from and therefore cannot recognize them in retrospect. It is often others who discover them first:

I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment. I will have tossed off some subtle remark as I write. (I mean, of course, dull for anyone else, sharp for me. But let’s leave aside all these amenities. Each man states this kind of thing according to his powers.) Later I have lost the point so thoroughly that I do not know what I meant; and sometimes a stranger has discovered it before I do.

Someone once asked Thomas Pynchon about a confusing plot point in his novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the famously reclusive author responded that he was so strung out on drugs while writing that book, he has no idea what most of it means, never mind how it all fits together. I am not a drug user, but I also sort of understand what Pynchon is saying. Often the form of a piece is purely accidental, ingrained by habit over many years and later enhanced by editing. But the process of how that got onto the page and what intent was behind it in the moment? That is more a matter of mood.

Montaigne describes that process this way:

I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself. Thus its speech is better than its writings, if there can be choice where there is no value.

I sometimes wonder how people react to what I write and try to determine if their interest and attention is related to things I wrote (or rewrote) most recently. For me, this returns to Montaigne’s thoughts on bits and pieces, because as often as my writing is strategic and intended to provoke a response, it is also from a place within me that I do not understand either in the moment or in retrospect.

Montaigne concluded that words often flow from unexplained places and find their meaning in that shadowland as well:

If I erased every passage where this happens to me, there would be nothing left of myself. At other times, chance will show me the light clearer than noonday and make me astonished at my hesitation.

As an audio accompaniment, I suggest Elliott Smith’s “No Name #3,” I can’t explain why the song fits, it just does.

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