My book has been out for two years now. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
I say this not in disappointment, not in surprise, but merely as disinterested observation. And in that spirit, before dismissing the prospect altogether, perhaps a little analysis is in order.
I mean, what would constitute setting the world on fire, anyway?
Enormous sales, a check in the mail—that’s a common measure. In this case, though, I’m not sure how you’d arrive at the appropriate amount. You could multiply hours spent working on the book by some arbitrary wage, I suppose. The World Bank may have an instrument capable of calculations at this scale. I doubt I could manage such figures. The point is, with respect to return on investment, it would be hard enough to determine fair compensation, much more so that of a windfall.
No, book-writing and money-making are activities that exist in wholly separate dimensions. But how otherwise to calculate worth?
I used to tell myself, during the darkest, most uncertain moments of work on this project, that if I could somehow bring it off, actually publish, and touch the mind and heart of a single reader—just one!—then it would have all been worthwhile. Many others have used this trick, I’m sure, to stave off abandonment, and I’m not sure I ever completely believed it. But a few months after the book came out, when I received a reader’s appreciative email, darn it if it didn’t turn out to be true. Then a second came. One was enough, and more than one was nice (in the way a blast of dopamine is nice). In fact, emails from readers seemed to come regularly for a while there. I won’t disclose the exact number because that would be crass and because whatever you’re imagining the number to be is almost certainly larger than it is.
Still, a few gratifying emails are a far cry from setting the world on fire.
“Why do people write books?” a professor of mine once asked the class. It was one of his typical “display questions.” Educators may be familiar with the term. In contrast to “genuine questions,” for which the questioner doesn’t know and genuinely wants to know the answer, display questions are questions asked a lot by teachers, who already know the answer but want to know if their students know. This professor was fond of display questions pulled from out of the blue. As students do and have always done, we waited a few seconds in silence for the professor to supply the answer he was looking for. But this time I listened extra carefully. This professor had authored several books, and I wanted to write books, too. I figured if I found out why this was so, I might be able to stop.
“People write books because they want to change the world!” he said.
I did a lot of thinking about that afterward, wondering if it was really true, wondering if the world was more absurd than I’d imagined. Now that I’ve written a book of my own, I see the claim as exaggerated.
I mean, I think I see what he was getting at. Writing a book is a gigantic undertaking—why would anyone do it if their ambition for it wasn’t equally grand? We tend to fear overreach, we tend to condemn it, but it isn’t the world’s worst sin. It’s pretty much inevitable even when the bar isn’t set quite so high.
Interior with an alchemist studying a book, his assistant pouring liquid into a bowl. Oil painting by Thomas Wijck.
But change the world? Set it on fire? Those aren’t the words I would use to describe my motivation. The task I set out for myself was a good deal more practical and realistic: to write a sober, calmly reasoned, carefully hedged, and rip-roaring history of ideas. Yes! A book full of human story, of dramatic people in vexing situations, set in exotic locales. Bali, Verdun, Golden Gate Park. Early dolphin work in Hawaii, sun sparkling on the water. Researcher-therapists with military haircuts, taking notes in a mental ward. R. D. Laing and his all night-dinners at Kingsley Hall, Stokely Carmichael taunting hippies at the Roundhouse in London, asylum inmates acting out the Revolution off-Broadway. The pendulum of Western thought was swinging from rational control, from mechanism back toward dependency and holism. Somewhere along that trajectory it would arrive again at the tragic. That was Gregory Bateson’s double bind to me.
Let me put this another way: My book would make a damn fine documentary series. There are photographs, there are films, locked away in archives, never before seen. The axioms of systems theory could be explained with amusing animations or by celebrity cameos in the manner of The Big Short. Clips could be shown from “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Catch-22,” while a psychedelic rock soundtrack plays. Owen Wilson could narrate. Netflix, are you listening?
That’s a genuine question, by the way. Though I do suspect I know the answer already.
3 Thoughts on this Post
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This a very candid reflection. I originally was going to write a somewhat longer comment but then realized I had little useful to say here, so I’ll leave it at that. (Except to say that that prof’s answer to his “display question” is obviously far from complete.)
Anthony, this post is beautiful and so needed — I need it now, anyhow. That “display question” is an existential question for me, as it has been for you. Your experience of reader emails is so heartening, and it is indeed a reason to keep going. It reminds me of Ecclesiastes — “Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will come back to you” and also of Eudora Welty’s Optimist’s Daughter, with the epiphanic passage about learning to live life open-handedly, clinging to no thing and releasing all to love. (I taught Emerson today, so your elegiac mode in this post is reverberating in many registers.)
I just talked to my editor — our editor — yesterday, and the conversation itself, about a book that still does not exist, was an act of faith, “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I can tell you that — right now, anyhow — I am writing this book because I said I would finish it, and if i give up on it now I will feel like more of a failure than I feel like when I know I should be writing but am not writing.
But I know my soul well enough to know that if I don’t eventually find the path of love running through this work, I will not find a path through it at all. No idea what the intersection of “love” and “canon wars” looks like. My soul will know, I guess. And love may not show up at all in the book. But the book, if it shows up at all, will show up in love.
Louis, thank you for reading and responding, even if you decided to trash the longer comment you wrote first. “Do I have anything useful to add?” That could be the subtitle of the piece. When I was working on my book, that was exactly the question that popped up whenever I walked into a library or bookstore. I had to learn to avoid them.
L.D., I’m grateful for your comment, too. Because a lot of the people who visit this blog have written books and/or are working on one now, I assumed the topic would be of some interest. Your bringing up Emerson reminded me of something I read about him once. If I remember correctly, he would take long walks through nature and write down passages as they came to him. A few lines here, a few lines there. When he had enough saved up, he’d find a way to jigsaw them into an essay. (Tom Waits writes song lyrics that way, I’ve heard.) It’s a legitimate process, though probably limited for historical works.
In any case, I know what you mean about finding a reason, one that runs deep. I also had to think of it as fun.