[In] 2011, I published a collection of memos and essays on creativity, and in one memo I said... “Truly integrated, enlightened souls may dispense wise advice, but they seldom write interesting fiction or poetry. They don’t need to. The natural medium of the achieved spirit is silence.” To which I added this codicil: “The rest of us talk and write to find our way, and it’s from the rest of us—with divided, conflicted selves—that good poetry and fiction might emerge.”
More and more now, I fantasize about arriving at a place and a time when I can finally prefer silence. Of course, dreams of arrival are never more than figments. Resign yourself to the road, I keep coaching myself, there’s no arriving. To be sure, for those of us who haven’t yet accomplished our life’s work—
nearly all of us—public language, the medium of the clubhouse, remains what we have. And so we go on trying to make sense of our many solitudes, and this layered mess of a world, by deploying words as well as we can.
- Steven Heighton, from his essay "Digital Distraction Is Bad for Creativity" in The Walrus. You can read the whole thing here.
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