Consume, Don't Create

Also some stuff about late-period Henry James

Lately I’ve come to realize that my attention is much more valuable than my work. It’s really been a strange thing to ponder: as a writer, I’m constantly begging people to look at my work—my constant struggle to promote myself and to gain traction means that I convey the subtle message that the work isn’t very good. After all, if this Substack, for instance, really had value, I wouldn’t need to give it away for free!

But the same market economy that puts a low value on my creative work puts a fairly high value on me as a consumer! I am exactly the reader, watcher, consumer, that everyone else wants. I am the person who can talk up a book or talk up a show and make other people interested in it. As a writer, I’m begging for attention, but as a reader and viewer I’m constantly turning away other people who are begging for my attention.

I’ve gotten very selective with my attention lately. I haven’t been going on the socials very much. I haven’t been reading the articles. I haven’t been discoursing. I’ve just been like…I don’t have time for this. My attention doesn’t really need to be occupied, honestly. There is more than enough in the present—in the here and now of my own life—to occupy me. I am perfectly capable of sitting silently on my bed for an hour: I don’t need anyone to fill my attention for me. I could stop all reading, watching, viewing forever, and I’d be perfectly fine.

I’ve written before about how many of the sages of the past were quite suspicious of reading. I could fill up a book with quotes about how it’s bad to read too much. Just last week, I saw in Nadezdha Mandelstam’s memoir her husband talking about how you should only read a few books, but read them well.

Something in modern life is definitely out of whack. There is too much entertainment. I can’t help thinking that once upon a time, when you directed your attention at something, it was in the knowledge that some of the attention was being directed back at you. If I’m in a classroom listening to a teacher, then the teacher is also actively engaged in talking to me. If I’m listening to a story, then the storyteller is speaking to me. We all inhabit the same space together, we all have some awareness of each other.

With the internet, that linkage is broken. We pay attention to people, and they have no idea. And yet they still, somehow, demand that attention from us. The feed psychically off it. And we want that passive attention from other people as well!

I don’t know, it’s very uncool to be a Luddite, but perhaps I’m just a Luddite. Sometimes I hold up my phone and stare at it, and I think, this is the box that makes me sad. I can look at this box, and nine times out of ten, what I see will sadden me. Often the sad thing is something that excites my envy: my book is coming out in two weeks, so any news about a book that is not mine saddens me. But I also get saddened when I go on Twitter and see the endless internecine fights between trans people. I look at the internet sometimes, and this world seems so sick: why are we constantly getting mad at each other? To what end? It makes no sense!

And yes, you can say I’m just talking about the internet and not about real life, but for the last ten years I’ve essentially lived on the internet: online life has been my real life. My emotions have been determined to a large extent by what comes at me through the sadness box.

Dunno—there’s no real escape. “Switching off” blog posts are like “weight loss” blog posts. Everyone writes about how great they feel after losing weight; nobody writes a blog post once the weight’s been regained. Everyone writes about their digital detox, nobody writes about the slow retoxification.

I’ve lately started to get this paranoid, almost PhilDickian feeling that the algorithm is plotting to recapture me. After 10/7 I got so disgusted with Twitter that I logged off for six months. Then I came back because I noticed a post about my YA novel going viral. I posted a thread of my own that also went viral. Then I posted a little more, and a few more things went viral (in a small way), and suddenly I was back on Twitter! I can’t help thinking the algorithm juiced my engagement, showed my tweets to more people who were likely to share it, precisely because it knew that was the way to recapture me.

Now I’ve left the social media (aside from Substack) again, but the algorithm will find a way to recapture me at some point, I’m sure. I’ll get a few dollops of attention, and suddenly I’ll experience my phone not as a sadness-box but as a happiness-machine! It’s a frightening thought. I keep telling myself that I can always turn off the computer, switch off the phone—that as long as I’m content with my own thoughts, nothing can capture me—but who knows? Things happen.

---

Lately I’ve gotten in the mood again for Henry James, so I picked up his late-period novel Wings of the Dove. I tried to read this book once before, maybe twelve years ago, and found it unutterably dull. But this time I was immediately gripped. I tried to explain to a friend what late-period Henry James is like, and I almost didn’t have the words: his late style is so strange, so baroque. It’s not precisely wordy—the diction isn’t terribly elevated, and the syntax isn’t that convoluted. It’s more that a lot of words are expended on such tiny moments. For instance, in the first chapter of Wings of the Dove one of the characters, Kate Croy, goes to visit her father, and they discuss back and forth, at length, the question of whether Kate ought to come live with her dad or ought instead to live with her rich aunt, who hates her dad, and wants her to disown her dad as a precondition of her help. And the movements and the desires and the undercurrents are so subtle and so restrained, and yet they’re teased out at such length. Late-period Henry James really feels like if someone started to take real life—the life that you and I lead—as the subject for fiction, and to pay attention to each and every moment of that real life.

Obviously there is artifice. Kate and her father are constructed characters—they both lead hot-house lives. They’re simultaneously restrained and exuberant: they experience wild flights of emotion, but only within a certain limited range. You couldn’t write a novel about such a small slice of life if you didn’t then ensure that this particular slice was phenomenally rich and complex.

I’ll include a brief quote here to give a taste of the book. Any given sentence of late James is clear, precise, and relatively restrained. But the accumulated effect of five thousand such sentences is what creates a lush, baroque, feverish sensation.

He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating, sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass he had reached, could give him pleasure, and had come back on these occasions to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome, that she was in her way a tangible value.

I don’t know—the book very much suits my current mood. Because although my reading life has been quite rich lately, I’ve actually been focusing most of my energies on real life—I’ve been going every day to my coworking space and talking to people in the real world. Overall, they’re very trivial interactions, but the process of talking to people in real life feels somehow like I’m chipping away at some accumulated gunk or build-up. It feels like there’s something there, in real life—some sense of power and control that’s absent from the virtual life.

At times I include reading within the ambit of virtual life. It’s not at all clear to me that reading books is qualitatively different from browsing Twitter. Both are solitary, passive activities. Both involve reading. Both will tend to fill you with desires and emotions that are foreign to your current life. I think the intensity and addictiveness of Twitter are much greater, but isn’t that a good thing? Don’t we want our entertainments to be intense? Surely the fact that books are insufficiently captivating is a knock against them, not a point in their favor.

And yet books are captivating. From an early age, I’ve preferred books to life, and I’ve wished that life could be more like books. I think that’s one reason I’ve always been so charmed by the tech industry that’s come to dominate life in San Francisco: the tech world has always felt like a world of action, rather than words. People doing things, making plans, taking meetings, creating decks, raising money, hiring folks, making promises, launching products—it’s all very different in kind from my own life. I always hoped that books would provide a portal to a world of action—and yet books ultimately are just a portal to more books.

Since I’m now spending so much time alone, with my own thoughts, I’ve come to realize that our day-to-day, moment-to-moment life is almost unbearably intense. Entertainment’s main function isn’t actually to stimulate us, it’s to get us to ignore that time doesn’t really exist—that real life is like a late-period Henry James novel, that it’s intractable and sticky, and we’re always glued to a very particular moment and embodied experience, and even if we want those things to change, it’s not really something that can happen very fast. I might be looking forward to dinner right now, for instance (with my latest diet, I eat one meal a day, at 8 PM), but the moments between now and 8 PM are almost endless. There is so much life between now and then. And yes, by entertaining myself, I can make that time go quicker: I can listen to music or watch TV or read a book or browse the internet, but to what end? I won’t get the time back! Eight PM will come, and I’ll eat, and I’ll have lost the intervening time forever.

You hear so much about mindfulness, and how mindfulness will solve every problem, but the truth about mindfulness is that it’s unbearable. The current moment is unbearable. And yet if we want to live forever and truly experience life, all we need is to eschew distractions. It’s like telling a kid they can have as many gift-wrapped presents as they want, but each present is just gonna be a rock. You can have as much life as you want, but each moment will be just as interminable and filipendulous as this one.

---

Well there’s no organic way of putting this in here, but you should buy my novel: The Default World. I also have events forthcoming in SF (May 30th) and NYC (June 6th). Click on the links to RSVP.