On Reading and Writing

First Blog, March 2021.

It seems quite fitting for a first blog to briefly reflect on the nature of reading and writing. Stating it succinctly, as I see it: to read is mostly about ’the other’, to write has its focus on ‘the one within’. It is however in their synthesis that we achieve universal affinity, which accounts for how important it is to bring them together if we are to sense the ‘whole’ in us.

Similarly, considering that we first start by taking in the world intuitively - ‘outside-in’, to use a spatial analogy - our perceptions are however incomplete until connecting and evolving from early instinct to understanding reality ‘inside-out’. Such journey – from own intuition to conceptual knowledge - will necessarily require time, maturity and learning.  

These thoughts take us necessarily to what is read and written nowadays: in a world increasingly flooded with ‘news’ and often short of valuable ‘information’ (read ‘knowledge’) it seems crucial to not read what is useless as well as to write only after what we know what to say after thinking it clearly and well.

Today, more than ever, to avoid reading and writing ‘for the sake of’… we should listen to the plea of those that persuasively show the enduring usefulness of classic literature [1] as well as how we must learn instead from those authors whose writings come from their own minds, not for what they’re trying to sell [2].

To end up on a personal note, sharing with you a passionate memory of early age and insight: do you recall your first calligraphy book, your tiny hand trying to master the pencil, the smell of fresh wood shavings coming out of the sharpener, the rubbery scent of the pencil eraser effacing the error?  

[1] Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics? Penguin 2009.

[2] A. Schopenhauer, “On Writing and Style”, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol.2, Cambridge Univ. Press 2015: 450-495.

Photo: Butterly Worm in my garden, Lidingö 2020 (J. de Morais)