First steps toward writing my book

I'm learning as I'm going

Tomorrow, March 2 at 8PM Eastern, we have a members-only Zoom call to discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. If you want to join the call, become a paying subscriber.

I’m now asking participants in the call to come with a question; at the beginning of the call I’ll ask everyone to share their question, then I’ll pick one and we’ll go from there. I look forward to discussing this text with you tomorrow.

I’m writing a book. Since it is my first time working in the world of professional publishing, I’m not sure what the etiquette and strategy of all of this is. Do I wait until the book is nearly done to announce it? Given the timelines of traditional publishing, that could be an awful long way away. Do I give you a play-by-play of all of the work? That will grow tedious quickly.

What I’ve decided to do is share updates on the process and the ideas behind my book. These are, hopefully, of general interest (especially the ideas, since they’ll be going into the final book). Today is the first such update, with a focus on how I formulated my thesis and how I’m going about research for the book.

Let’s start at the beginning.

If you have followed along with the philosophical read-alongs on this newsletter, you might have noticed a theme. It has never been expressly stated, save for a comment I made in one of our discussion threads; once I state it, though, I think it will be obviously. I’m interested in what it means to be a human being in the modern world. I’m interested in those same questions that motivated Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics and Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. It happens to also be a theme Woolf, Le Guin, and Ishiguro explored at length in various ways.

The stress in emphasis should be placed on the latter half the theme, however. If I were merely interested in what it means to be a human being, I might just read Aristotle, the Bible, the Philokalia, and such over and over. I might consult some Darwin. I might return, once again, to Nietzsche. Really, I could read any number of texts — the question is too broad. But if we focus on in the modern world, it begins to narrow.

Clearly, I’m thinking of technology. Nearly everyone around the world now carries a digital multitool capable of calls, messages, tracking, shopping, and much more. We all know that this has radically transformed our lives, the way that we live as individuals and as groups. That one piece of technology has reshaped what it means to be human. In Arendt’s terms: the human condition has changed.

The devil in your pocket

This is just one example, and I don’t want to bore you with others, so forgive the quick generalization: I have come to believe that modern technology, just like our modern economic and political systems, have grave costs associated with their many benefits. In particular, it has done violence to our ability to live the life of the mind, the vita contemplativa.

This has become the focus of my book. The question I want to answer is simple: how do you live the life of the mind in the modern world? How do you manage it all in the age of distraction? What’s the point of living the life of the mind, anyway?

You can see that I started to explore some of these ideas on YouTube, too. Like in this video, ostensibly about focus, what I’m really concerned with the lost ability to think.