The writer’s relationship with experience is structurally different from everyone else’s, and the difference is the source of both the writer’s specific capability and their specific problem. The writer is always potentially extracting material: the conversation at dinner is the conversation and simultaneously the observation of the conversation.
The person across the table is the person and simultaneously the potential character. The experience is the experience and simultaneously the potential subject. This double relationship with the present is not cynical: it is the cognitive habit that the practice of writing develops, and it is what makes the writer’s account of their experience richer in the specific way that the writer’s observation produces and that the non-writer’s direct experience does not.
It also means the writer is never fully in the experience. The observational layer is always present between the writer and what they are observing, and the observational layer, however thin, is the layer that produces the specific distance that writing requires and the specific presence that living requires.
The writer who has been writing about life for a long time at some point begins to notice that the life being written about is increasingly experienced as material rather than as itself, and that the material is becoming less interesting because the life that produces it is being observed from rather than lived in.
The Deliberate Not-Writing
The writer who boarded the Naora voyage made a specific decision before boarding: no notebook on deck. The cabin notebook, available for the things that could not be held and that required recording to avoid the loss that sleep produces in the unrecorded thought: yes.
The deck notebook, the notebook that signals to the writer’s observational layer that the experience is material rather than life: no. The decision was to be in the passage rather than to observe it, for the duration of the passage, and to discover whether the life that was not being observed for material was different in quality from the life that was.
The first few days were uncomfortable. The observational habit does not release easily: the consciousness that has been trained to extract material from experience continues to attempt to extract material even when the notebook is absent. The Long Table conversation on day four produced three ideas and nowhere to put them, and the loss of the three ideas was a small grief that the writer felt more specifically than they had expected to feel it.
By day seven the habit had thinned and the experience had thickened, and by day ten the passage was the passage rather than the subject of the passage, and the specific quality of being in it rather than observing it was producing something that the notebook in the cabin could not have captured and that the notebook on the deck would have prevented.
The Writing After the Passage
The writing that came after the passage was different from the writing that had preceded it. Not better in the technical sense of more polished or more precise: different in the quality of the life that was present in it. The three weeks of being in the experience without observing it for material had produced a different kind of material: the material that comes from inside the experience rather than from the observation of it, the material that the direct living accumulates in the body rather than the notebook.
The writer who has been living rather than observing has the specific authority of the person who was actually there rather than the person who was watching someone who was there, and the difference is visible in the writing in a way that the reader feels rather than identifies.
The voyage did not become the subject of the writing, or not primarily. What it became was the source of the quality that the writing needed: the quality of genuine presence in the life being written about, which had been thinning as the observational habit had thickened. The passage restored the balance between the observer and the participant, and the writing that followed had the specific authority that the balance produces. The writer had stopped writing about life for three weeks. The life had returned to the writing.
