`Astonishment & Pleasure'

I once thought my years as a newspaper reporter were the surrogate graduate school I had never attended. Today, I think of them as my second chance at grade school because that’s where I learned to write. Newspaper editors don’t understand sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike. They want 15 tight, multiple-source column-inches of copy by 4 o’clock. Decades of deadlines washed away any lingering dilettantism. The only way to write is to sit down and write, even when thoughts are nebulous or absent. Concentration spawns momentum..

In fact, I have often been unable to understand an idea, to conceptualize and articulate it, until after I’ve already written about it. Here’s another way to phrase it: I can’t think my way into better writing, but I can write my way into better thinking. Act precedes thought, a formula I think William James would have endorsed. Afterwards, looking at what I’ve written, I think: I didn’t know that. Who wrote it, and how? I found an 1820 passage by Richard Woodhouse, John Keats’ devoted friend, that illuminates my experience as a writer. This comes from The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816-1878, edited by Hyder Edward Rollins:

“He has said, that he has often not been aware of the beauty of some thought or expression until after he has composed & written it down – It has then struck him with astonishment -- & seemed rather the production of another person than his own – He has wondered how he came to hit upon it […] – Perhaps every one in the habit of writing verse or prose, may have had a somewhat similar feeling, that of the extreme appositeness & happiness (the curiosa felicitas) of an idea, of the excellence of which he was unaware until he […] came to read it over. It seems scarcely his own; & he feels that he could never imitate it or hit upon it again: & he cannot conceive how it came to him – Such Keats said was his Sensation of astonishment & pleasure when he has produced the lines `His white melodious &c – It seemed to come by chance or magic – to be as it were something given to him.”

Woodhouse quotes from Book III of “Hyperion”:

“`Show thy heart’s secret to an ancient Power
Who hath forsaken old and sacred thrones
For prophecies of thee, and for the sake
Of loveliness new born.’ — Apollo then,
With sudden scrutiny and gloomless eyes,
Thus answer’d, while his white melodious throat
Throbb’d with the syllables.”

Keats was fortunate to have so sympathetic and attentive a friend. With the help of Woodhouse, here's how I would write the equation I stumbled over earlier: Hard Work + Mystery = "Astonishment & Pleasure."