Essay Is a Better Format Than Book
When in doubt, read more essays and short stories.
Most of what I’ve read, I’ve completely forgotten. Whatever it all was about, it turned out to not be relevant enough to remember.
Occasionally, though, while reading, I will be shocked with sudden insight. My heart rate will rise. I’ll almost not be able to read fast enough. The thinker in question will become a new fixation for me (most recently this was Walker Percy). I’ll go on to read many books’ worth of his material and his influences’ materials. When the frenzy ends, I’ll hopefully have added one or two essays’ worth of worthwhile insight to my worldview.
I’ve noticed a power law: it takes the average prolific and committed writer approximately one lifetime to produce the equivalent of one good essay. It’s impossible for them to know from the outset what tiny fraction of what they write will be worthwhile. If they had set out to directly write their lifetime essays’ worth of material, they will have only produced what is entirely beside the point. A writer has to spend most of his time writing wrong things in order to learn to feel what it’s like to write the right things. That isn’t even to say he will necessarily write the essay that perfectly circumscribes his essay’s worth of material. More than likely it will be dispersed across their corpus like the members of Osiris.
He has to rely on the readers doing a similar power-law navigation to interpret and identify his relevant material. As a reader, the vast majority of what you read is practically useless and irrelevant (as far as you’re concerned), except insofar as the practice of reading itself is your journey of blindly circumscribing your interest. And as you read all of this mostly irrelevant material, you gain, by those seemingly random frenzies of insight, the direction and sense for further insight.
After all the hundreds of books and essays I’ve read, and given how they’ve developed my ability to see what is important about what I read next, I have only distilled from all of that about ten essays’ worth of insights that formulate my entire worldview. That number could be anywhere from five to a hundred, depending on how you define it, or on how often there’s churn: when reaching that new level destroys the previous insights’ value.
Only once they’re in hindsight, those foundational insights are fully digestible in one very human-sized portion: thirty minutes to four hours. A sitting. These things have a natural rhythm to them, based, I’m sure, on our circadian rhythms and gastrointestinal limits and the resulting scale of waxing and waning attention spans. The relative length of sustained attention reveals the relevance and interest of the subject matter: You have a very long and steady attention span for something that’s relevant to you, and a short and sharp attention span for something that’s probably irrelevant to you, but has a small chance of being extremely relevant. Looking at it this way, social media feeds are hypothetically like micro-essays that may, in theory, lead you to a longer essay, which might lead you to a book, which might lead to a change in your foundational beliefs. More on why that doesn’t happen later.
The essay is a better format than the book or short form when you first start looking for these insights, specifically because it fits into a more natural rhythm of human attention. When not stricken by a total immersive interest in a particular writer that lasts for days or weeks, a good thing to do is to read essays and short stories until something really grabs you.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just know what material we needed to read, and be directed straight toward them? This, unfortunately, is impossible, because your ability to even recognize the right information only comes in random explosions of insight after long slogs. This is the Mr. Miyagi wax-on-wax-off idea: you’re not capable of doing the cool karate move until you’ve bored yourself stiff with the basics. Short-form does not cultivate this, but both books and essays do, I find. People are much more likely to finish essays.
