Years ago, after I’d finished my MFA and given up on writing because I had small children and realized that literary fiction had become a vanishingly small part of American society, I started to blog. I started blogging because I felt trapped by my home life or maybe it’s because I felt trapped by my writing life or maybe it’s because I have some compulsion to write that has to sometimes be tended like a fire, which is annoying, I get it. Anyhow, I started blogging, and I think it’s probably how I became an essayist because I learned how to write about nothing.
The fiction writers would say that you need to learn to shape every narrative into a story, which is sort of the opposite of what I’m arguing here. I think you need to learn to write about nothing because most of life is nothing and GD if we don’t live in a culture where everything is supposed to mean something, mean everything.
I think if everyone became an essayist of the nothing we’d live in a better society. I say that based on zero empirical evidence and a vague vibe I have about ways to save the world, democracy, humanity etc, which are usually delivered to my spouse during our nightly ritual of brushing our teeth and saving the world. Sometimes she listens and we chat. Other times it’s clear she can’t hear me over the sound of her toothbrush and that’s when I really feel free to expound on my ideas. I work myself into a froth and not just from the toothpaste. Anyhow, you’re all welcome to come over to my house some night and watch us brush our teeth, it’s sort of the equivalent of being in the old Greek Acropolis, if that’s the place where things were debated. See, if this wasn’t a Substack, if it was an essay, I’d fact check myself, but I’m given the freedom to be wrong here, and it’s something I see people have availed themselves of in our culture on a minute by minute basis, so I’ll have my dose of freedom as well.
Anyhow, I think my point is pretty clear. I know it’s more fun to spend your whole day assembling various texts, sub-reddit threads, Adorno (I’ve never read Adorno), to make up some theory about humanity, but I’d encourage you to sometimes take a break from all that meaning making to enjoy the beauty of nothing at all.
My favorite part of the day was walking down a familiar path, slightly muddy from last night’s rain, the beginnings of leaf litter underfoot, and catching the morning light through the green of a maple that hugs the bend in the creek. Listen, if I was Jenny Odell, and I kind of am Jenny Odell, I’d get a whole big book about it and people in N+1 writing about how I’d cracked the code of the digital world by doing nothing, but I’m just saying, take it a step further, write about nothing, embrace it, celebrate it, catalogue it. We’re all in this together. Maybe.