What I think about when I think about writing

or, how that's a ridiculous title

Apr 11, 2025

Hello.

I was going to title this post '“What I think about when I think about ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’”, which is a stupid, ridiculous title and amusing (or not) only to those who, like myself, have read every printed ounce of Haruki Murakami and spend their time contemplating just what it is about an author writing about running that makes for a compelling read. Then I realised that what I wanted to say wouldn’t have much or anything to do with Murakami’s book on running, which in itself isn’t all that much about running and instead is about writing, and baseball, and it turns out I don’t know anything about baseball, and I’m not overly fond of running, but I have visited Japan and I do think a lot about writing, so perhaps the premise remains and so the title became what it is, not that I’m going to be touching upon it all that much, which, I realise, doesn’t make for an overly compelling start…

I should also note that I was going to start this post with an apology, but a wise person once said “Never start with an apology,” and so I didn’t, but if you’re curious then the apology was going to be about how the next entry from The Botanist—my something-serial about, well, a botanist (though not the usual type1)—is still being written and isn't yet ready, and so if you’d asked then I would have said to please excuse the delay, it’s being written, it’s just I’ve been distracted by all manner of things. Mostly work.

Mostly work. I’m halfway through semester now, a point in time that I always dream of earlier in the year, not because I dislike the semester—far from it, in fact; the students are what keep me alive—but because the workload reaches its peak always around this time and I know that once I have broached this point there is a glimmer of relief on the horizon. A distant, cold, southern-hemisphere-in-June horizon, but a horizon nonetheless.

All this is to say that I have come home in the evenings with little in the way of creative zest for writing, and nor have I awoken wanting to put pen to page, feeling often so deflated that I couldn’t even find desire to read2. This is, I realise, partly because I have been drained by spending a good couple of weeks writing a new case study for biomed students. I put in a not insignificant amount of effort, throwing in a short third-person narrative scene and trying to flex skills that I have hopefully learnt here from writing fiction, along with a fake autopsy report, notes and documents and snippets of facts, making it all look at least passably realistic and doing all this to give it some authenticity and make the students have to work to unpuzzle the scenario. They’d then use that information to complete a series of questions and analyses related to the case and its broader implications, it being the kind of thing that I myself would enjoy working through, that being my metric for how I should pitch the activities I facilitate in class. So I was somewhat deflated when all of that was shot down and it was compressed into a bland, flat, uninspired Google Doc because “it’ll be easier for the students.” Sigh. Oh well. It’s not my own unit, so I don’t have the final say. The upside is it’s made me think about creating a twisting and winding scenario for the unit I do coordinate—the one I have full control over—full of students I’ve now come to think of as my family, taking some pedagogical learnings and writing a large piece as an exercise in revision ahead of their final exam.

So I’ve been thinking about that, but I’ve also been thinking about something else: a conversation between

Sam Harris

and his wife Annaka that introduces a chapter of Annaka’s new audio documentary, Lights On. I find links in posts awkward, because I want to remain within the page when I’m reading, but I’m going to link out below, because this is a must listen. I love Sam Harris. I’ll say that openly. His approach to meditation, via his Waking Up app, probably saved me back in 2021 and forever changed the way I perceive the world, and his thoughts and conversations via his podcast Making Sense resonate deeply. Here, his conversation with Annaka feels like you’re listening in on an intimate dinnertime chat—albeit a deeply philosophical one, but perhaps such is regular in their household—and the moments when you hear their relationship bubble to the surface—and especially when Annaka laughs—are just beautiful. But it’s the content that is so compelling. The episode contains a free chapter of Lights On and it’s enough to make me go grab the whole thing. It’s all about consciousness, what consciousness is, whether it’s a fundamental property of the universe, and various other things that are equally reality-shattering. I’m fascinated by consciousness, as are others I’ve spoken to here or whose words have hinted upon this topic3.

The episode of Sam and Annaka is here and contains links out to Annaka’s full audio documentary.

I’ve written more than I’d expected, a hopeful sign that perhaps this little trough of writing block has passed, so I’ll finish with one final thing.

I was reading on the train to work this morning, and then on the bus, and when the bus finally pulled into the loop that enters the university campus, we passed a car being driven by a man who, in his seeming confusion of signage, had found himself within the loop and was casually letting a passenger out of his car, a woman whom my mind assumed to be his wife, for their exchange seemed that of husband and wife, and possibly it was a good exchange, an end-of-week farewell, a see you tonight darling, don’t be late, we’ll serenade the weekend with our love, that type of an exchange, and the man was so occupied with this goodbye that, coupled with his unawareness that cars shouldn’t ever be within the loop, he didn’t see the bus sidle alongside and the bus driver honked and shouted and spouted a tirade that continued until the man, flustered, started the car and left and the bus took its final turn and pulled up alongside the curb and all the passengers—the students and occasional academic, those who, like myself, prefer the opportunity for public transport over sitting behind the wheel in traffic—disembarked, and as I was stepping down from the bus my eyes landed back on the page where I had been reading and I just stopped, unable to move, because I was in awe of the words that I was reading, and it left me with a profound sense of something, some strange awareness of what it is to connect to an author through words that are crafted with power, and I thought perhaps that even the words were conscious, because that is where my mind has been all week.

Which is all hyperbole to say this is the best passage I’ve read all week, all month, possibly all year, which is in itself hyperbole, and it comes from an author whose prose makes me want to write, and I don’t know if there’s anything more important to me than that right now.

…and he knew then that the enormous wings had not grown between his shoulder blades, like an anatomical anomaly, but that a great butterfly, as long as he was tall, had climbed onto his back and anchored itself firmly onto his ribs, and it watched him with budding, glowing eyes that had thousands of hexagonal facets. He imagined the inevitable moment when the twisted spiral of its proboscis would unroll, like a curved needle, and slide into his occiput, gently popping through his epidermis, the tip, hard as a diamond, slicing at a slant his skull’s layers of bone, puncturing the duramater and piamater, advancing slowly, greased like gelatin, through the occipital lobe, and stopping in the center of his brain, in the middle of the limbic ring, equidistant from the fornix, mammillary bodies, hippocampus and amygdalae, and sucking out, like a vacuum, one cubic centimeter of cream-caramel matter and replacing it with an egg…

—Mircea Cărtărescu

SLAKE

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