Author: James Geary

I love London. It’s such a stunningly beautiful city, a fact I was reminded of the other evening while sitting on top of Primrose Hill at sunset. It was my wife’s birthday and we had eaten dinner at Trojka, a Russian restaurant nearby, and then walked up to the top of the hill in the cool, late dusk. From the top ofPrimrose Hill, you have a panoramic view of the city. It can be alarming at first, because right in front of your nose is that hideous spark plug of a building, the BT Tower. But further east, you can see the London Eye, the Gherkin, the majestic dome of St. Paul’s, a bit closer is the new Arsenal stadium, and further east is Canary Wharf. If you look very closely, you can see the tiered steeple ofSt. Bride’s Church, which is where whoever got the idea for the layered wedding cake got the idea for the layered wedding cake. The beauty of this scene was enhanced by the regular appearance of a rubber chicken, which made a brief arc across my line of vision before disappearing again.

It was a guy walking his dog. He was crouched on the grass, just over the lip of the hill so that I couldn’t see him or his dog from where I was sitting. But he was playing a game of fetch with his dog, and every time he tossed that rubber chicken into the air it rose briefly into view before disappearing below the horizon line. I only had a glimpse of it each time; chickens really can’t fly that far. But it truly was a thing of beauty, that gangly, pimply, yellow, featherless projectile. I followed its brief flight eagerly, then turned my attention back to the lovely view. And the lampposts. The lampposts on Primrose Hill are some of the loveliest lampposts I’ve ever seen. Especially when you’re walking uphill and there’s no one at the top, and all you can see at the summit are the silhouettes of those elegant London lampposts etched against the pink-streaked sky. I love London.

London always reminds me of a brain. It is similarly convoluted and circuitous. A lot of cities, especially American ones like New York and Chicago, are laid out in straight lines. Like the circuits on computer chips, there are a lot of right angles in cities like this. But London is a glorious mess. It evolved from a score or so of distinct villages, that merged and meshed as their boundaries enlarged. As a result, London is a labyrinth, full of turnings and twistings just like a brain. Its intelligence is distributed, too, like a brain’s. Each of these little villages—Primrose Hill, Highgate, Clapham, the City—has its own specializations and expertise. They are self-sufficient, even as they are inextricably and essentially part of the whole metropolis. It’s easy to get lost in London, something that probably has as much to do with my poor sense of direction as with the intricacies of the urban layout. Because it’s like a brain, London has loads of folds and crevasses that you’re always falling into unexpectedly. Until last week, I never knew there was a deer park in the western part of Hampstead Heath. And I never would have found it if I hadn’t gotten briefly lost while out for a run on the Heath. London is so rich, so twisted, it always has something new to show you. There’s always something you didn’t know about it. Samuel Johnson, who lived across the street from St. Bride’s Church off Fleet Street, was certainly right when he wrote his famous aphorism about London:

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

But I also like what Henry James, an American who lived in and loved the city, had to say about the place, even though it doesn’t really qualify as an aphorism:

It is difficult to speak adequately, or justly, of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

It’s incredibly hot. Every window in the house is open, in the hope of conducting any passing breeze through some steaming corridor or room. One of these gentle breezes knocked over a framed drawing by my daughter, propped on a shelf in my study. I was on the stairs when it happened. Thought I heard someone drop a handful of cutlery. Couldn’t find the source of the noise, though. Not in the kitchen. Not in the bathroom. Then noticed the frame face down on the floor of my study, some shards of glass poking out from underneath it like splayed cartoon limbs from under a boulder. I picked up the frame and drawing, shooed my curious daughter away from the glass, and swept it up. Like an idiot, I continued to walk around in bare feet. It’s so damn hot, you see.

So I stepped on a shard of glass, well away from the spot where the frame actually fell. It pierced the side of the toe next to my little toe. It was excruciating. A sharp, icy, cruel pain. I literally leaped off the ground when it happened. I hobbled to the chair and extracted the tiny sliver from my toe. It was smaller than a grain of rice, but possessed of incredible power to inflict pain. I walked over to the waste basket and dropped it in. It made a tiny but satisfying “chink” sound as it hit the metal bottom. Then, on the way back to my chair, I stepped on another shard of glass. I was now officially in my own slapstick comedy, bouncing around like a pogo stick, cradling my left foot in my hand, cursing under my breath while trying to chart a course through the room and into the hall that wouldn’t take me over any more broken glass.

This shard lodged near my heel. It’s still in there, I think. My wife poked the bottom of my foot with a sewing needle for about 10 minutes and couldn’t find it. Not even with the toy magnifying glass she grabbed from our son’s secret spy kit, which he got for his birthday a couple of years ago and hasn’t looked at since. We’re a family that thinks ahead, you see, well prepared for any emergency. There is just the tiniest pin prick in the rough skin on the bottom of my foot, a drop of blood no bigger than the head of a pin. Really very small. Probably no more than a dozen angels could dance on it in a pinch. It hurts to touch and makes my whole foot feel sore, though that may just be my imagination. When you are in pain, and can’t immediately find the cause, you imagine you’re in much greater danger than you really are.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg—scientist, astronomer, discover of Lichtenberg figures and aphorist—said it all when he composed this aphorism:

Why does a suppurating lung give so little warning and a sore on the finger so much?

It’s bizarre and scary but true: little things often pain us more than far graver things that keep themselves hidden. The speck of glass that even now may be working its way deeper into the flesh of my left foot hurt a lot today but will soon be forgotten. A close friend told my wife last week that an ex-lover of hers, someone whom at one point she was ready to marry, was diagnosed with lung cancer. He’s in his mid-forties, never smoked, has a couple of kids; now he’s got three months to live. We get no warning, and we have no idea how far the shards of experience will scatter—or when and in what form they will resurface.

I have tried to love it, I really have. But I have failed. As an American living in Europe, I almost feel it’s incumbent upon me to take an interest in the game that obsesses Europe and so much of the world, all of the world, in fact, apart from the United States of America. Here I am: I eat the food, speak a language or two, observe the national holidays. Surely I can manage a little passion for football, too. But I have well and truly failed to care. I even watched the World Cup with my son, who is a football enthusiast. But while I enjoyed watching the game with him, I did not enjoy the game itself. On the contrary. It reminded me of why it is I can’t get worked up about it. I used to think it was a ‘cultural thing.’ Like cricket; I just don’t get it. Any sport in which the players wear sweaters and break for lunch will, alas, remain forever alien to me. But there’s more to it than that with football. It really is a beautiful game–Zinedine Zidane’s header and Italian goalie Gianluigi Buffon’s save were gorgeous–but there’s an ugly side to it that really turns me off.It almost seems as if all of the vices (nationalism, racism, hooliganism, violence) that Europe has so successfully repressed, suppressed or sublimated for much of the past 60 years suddenly burst to the surface in football. What a shame, a disgrace that the World Cup final should be marred by insults (whether racist, mother-related or whatever) and headbutts. That’s obvious, I know, but as far as I know things like that don’t happen in other sports on the same scale. Sure, every sport has its neanderthals—just as every country, society and social class does. But thuggishness seems so prevalent in football, among players, coaches, fans. For all I know many sports may be riven by the same kinds of attitudes. Why does it spill out onto the pitch so often in football? Take ice hockey, for instance. That’s an incredibly violent game, with fights regularly breaking out among players. But they’re usually fighting instinctively, as a result of crashing into one another so often not because one player allegedly insults another player’s mother. That doesn’t justify it, of course. But somehow it’s less of a blight on the game. You come to watch an ice hockey match, but get a round or two of boxing as well.

So, I have resigned myself to not loving football. The sport won’t miss me. But I can still appreciate football’s great aphorists. Baseball has Yogi Berra, who said, among other things:

It ain’t over til it’s over.

But football has Johan Cruijff:

Every disadvantage has its advantage.

and Brian Clough:

I wouldn’t say I was the best manager in the business. But I was in the top one.

and Bill Shankly:

Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I’m very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.

It’s tough to compete with that.

Encountering a bird in a house is always an uncanny experience. There is something both frightening and compelling about it. Frightening because birds can be very scary in confined spaces; they dart around in a panic, their wings beating furiously, making a sound like someone violently punching a pillow. Compelling because birds suddenly seem so alien when you find them unexpectedly perched in your kitchen. Poised on top of a cupboard, a bird seems like a little household deity who’s dropped by for a quick visit. I can see why some ancient peoples believed they were gods. I have found birds in houses three times in my life, and the experiences never really fade with time. The most recent encounter was just last week, when I found a wood pigeon poking around on the kitchen floor.

It’s been so hot recently that we always keep the kitchen door, which leads onto the garden, open. I came downstairs to make some tea and saw the wood pigeonscavenging for crumbs on the floor. My arrival startled it and it flew up on top of a cupboard. Wood pigeons are truly enormous birds. Plump and pugnacious, they remind me of those backpackers on the Tube who are constantly prodding you with the sleeping bags that are strapped to their backs. This wood pigeon kept its beady little eyes on me as I carefully shut the kitchen door to prevent it flying into the rest of the house. The door to the garden was already wide open, so all I had to do was guide the beast in that general direction. It was pretty easy to do. I just walked toward it and it took off, bumping into the window once before finding the door. I spent the next 15 minutes locating and cleaning up the droppings it left behind in its hurried departure.

Just a few weeks before my pigeon spotting incident, I was in France and what I think was a yellowhammer finch flew into my bedroom. This bird was harder to liberate. It was timid and perched on the window, so it flew to the opposite side of the room every time I approached to open the window far enough so it could escape. Eventually, after a few tours around the bedroom, it did manage to get away. It’s a pitiful, lightly thudding sound, though: a small, desperate bird repeatedly hurling itself against glass.

The first time I found birds in a house was when I was about 18 and camping in Maine. I came across an old, boarded up hut in the woods. I snapped a few planks across the door and climbed in. Immediately, a small bird (I don’t know what kind it was) swooped and swirled around my head. I spent the best part of an hour trying to herd it toward the small opening I made in the window. But it was difficult because the window was so tightly boarded up that I could only open it a crack. Eventually, though, the bird did get through and I celebrated. But it was a short-lived celebration. Looking around the place more closely, I discovered another bird—the same type as the one that escaped and no doubt its partner—dead on the floor.

The Austrian aphorist Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach has some nice aphorisms about birds. Actually, they are about flying, but they give me that same kind of frightening, compelling feeling as finding a bird in the house:

You can sink so fast that you think you’re flying.

Just rise up again after every fall from a great height! Either you’ll fall to your death or you’ll grow wings.

I recently disposed of an old toiletry bag. It was an unlovely thing: pallid gray, the color of chewed chewing gum. It was given away free at the last baseball game I attended before leaving San Francisco to move to Europe (that was, um, 17 years ago), so it had the SF Giants logo on one side and the Ortho corporate logo on the other. Ortho, a petroleum company, I think, was the sponsor for this particular giveaway. It was my very first toiletry bag (how did I get by without one for so long?) and, until a week or so ago, the only one I ever owned. Now I have a sleek new black toiletry bag that my wife picked up at Ikea. That’s the kind of store Ikea is: you go there for a bed or some shelves or a kitchen cabinet and come home with a set of collapsible cardboard storage boxes, a cheap and cheerful throw rug and four toiletry bags instead. Anyway, when I finally heaved the old Giants toiletry bag, I took one long last look at it and saw for the first time how shabby, battered and unappealing it really was. Why had I kept it for so long?

I’m not by nature a hoarder. In fact, I’m pretty meticulous about chucking stuff that’s been outgrown, passed its sell-by date or generally outlived its usefulness. Especially packaging. I hate having packaging lying around. This is a constant source of friction with my wife. She not only leaves empty packaging lying around, she actually puts the stuff back where she found it—even though there’s nothing left in it! I regularly find boxes of tea (without any teabags), yogurt containers (without any yogurt) and cans of beans (with about 11 mold-encrusted beans in the bottom) carefully replaced in their appropriate places in the kitchen. Why does she do it? Maybe she doesn’t realize the packaging is, in fact, empty. Or maybe, for some weird aesthetic reason, she just likes having the stuff around. Or is it some genetic memory of the Dutch “hunger winter” of 1944-45, when her parents and grandparents and everyone else in the northern half of the Netherlands survived on grass and potatoes until the Allies arrived? Anyway, having taken a more clear-eyed view of my dilapidated and, frankly, disgusting old toiletry bag, I have become less critical of this particular peccadillo.

I once had a pair of shoes that I wore for ten years. When I bought them, they were probably the single most expensive article of clothing I had ever purchased. I was determined to get value for money. But I kept on wearing them even long after they really should have been respectfully retired. When I finally did concede that I needed a new pair of shoes, I went to a shoe shop to buy them. Under the harsh glare of the shop’s fluorescent lights, with the shoe salesmen looking on disapprovingly and (I imagined at least) with a slight sense of pity, I held my old shoes in my hands and looked at them. They were incredibly shabby: all scuffed and discolored, a couple of deep gouges in the leather, and the sole peeling away from the rest of the shoe in several places. They were, I realize now, a disgrace. They looked like the shoes Charlie Chaplin wore (and ate) in The Gold Rush. But, heck, they sure were comfortable. As it says in The Upanishads:

The mind being full, the whole universe is filled with the juice of nectar; the whole earth is covered with leather to him who has put his foot in the shoe.

Amazon.com has a pretty nifty feature that’s a spin-off from its controversial Search Inside! program. Search Inside! allows users to read portions of a book, or search for keywords inside the text of a book, before actually buying it. Many publishers and authors are up in arms about it because they fear, probably correctly in the case of academic books and textbooks as well as other specialized subjects like cookbooks, that people won’t buy the books at all if they can get the information they’re looking for for free by searching inside the book on amazon. The risk to revenue is probably less for most fiction and non-fiction books, though the capability for unlimited search is certainly a threat to both authors and publishers. It’s also a useful selling tool, though, since the complete text of a book is not accessible online and if someone is sure they will find what they’re looking for in your book, they are much more likely to buy it. In any case, a side-effect of Search Inside! is that amazon compiles interesting statistics based on an analysis of the words in a book.

The stats for my history of aphorisms can be found here. Here you will learn, among other things, that of all the books in all of the categories on amazon, 63% are easier to read than my book, while 37% are harder to read. This is based on something called the Fog Index, a measure of the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text. It is not, I hope, a measure of the mist that I deliberately pump into my prose. In terms of complexity, of words and sentence structure, my book is right in the middle, with more or less half of all other books listed as more complex and half as less complex. (A word is considered “complex” if it has three or more syllables.) I’m a bit wordy, though. Only 23% of all other amazon books have more words per sentence than mine, a statistic that comes as a mild shock to me, since I’ve always considered myself a man of few words, admittedly in speech rather than in writing, but then again I’ve always held the view that there are few greater pleasures in life than a nicely constructed long sentence with plenty of dense subordinate clauses that languidly undulate from the main sentence like so many tributaries of an interesting stream of consciousness. Or maybe not. You do get pretty good value for money from my book, though, mostly due to my verbosity. Buyers of the hardback get 4,070 words for every dollar and 3,666 words for every ounce.This is all kind of interesting but really not all that useful, except for children’s books, where measures like these would be helpful in matching a book to a child’s reading level. The really interesting statistic is the concordance, an alphabetized list of the 100 most frequently occurring words in a book, excluding common words such as “of” and “it”. As you would expect, the most frequently occurring word in my book is—you guessed it—”aphorisms”. It occurs 250 times. The next nine most frequently occurring words are:

• life 160
• own 123
• man 111
• book 105
• things 104
• time 97
• thought 93
• first 89
• world 83

The concordance is by far the most interesting, and useful, set of statistics about a book. One of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s best aphorisms is:

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

A true variation on this is:

Tell me what words you use and I’ll tell you who you are.

I was happy to see the top ten most frequently used words in my book, because three of them—life, man and thought—can be found in the Ralph Waldo Emerson aphorism that opens my book:

Life consists of what a man is thinking of all day.

This made me happy because I believe that aphorism sums up not only my book, but my life. It was gratifying to see that I was writing like I was thinking, even if I do tend to go on and on a bit…

“Do you have a light?” That’s what the guy who cleans our street asked me, a cigarette dangling from his lips, flexing his thumb as though he was giving a lighter a flick. “No, I don’t,” I said. “Sorry.” I don’t smoke, never have, and don’t carry fire about on my person. Sometimes, though, the simplest questions can get me thinking. After I answered him, I thought about the more literal, or maybe more metaphorical, meaning of his query. The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson had a thing about fire. He made a trip to Vesuvius once, walked all the way up the rim, and the bubbling volcano made a deep impression on him. He bought a cheap print of Vesuvius in Italy, which still hangs in his house in Concord, Massachusetts, which is now a museum. Fire was an image of creativity and spirituality for him. In his essay The Poet, he wrote: “We were put into our bodies, as fire is put into a pan, to be carried about.” So I asked myself, Do I have a light that I carry about with me?

Everybody has a light. I don’t mean some vague spiritual concept, or aura, or anything at all nebulous or New Age-y. I mean a person’s ambiance, the first impression a person makes on you, the sense of clarity or obscurity you get from speaking or interacting with a person. I mean something very tangible that you can see immediately, part of the complex set of conscious and unconscious perceptions that makes you intuitively like or dislike a person. Some people can strike us as shady, for example, as having veiled motives. Others impress instantly with their brightness, a kind of light that ignites whatever it touches. Others seem to have too much glare, as if they cast a spotlight that they both pointed at themselves and managed to stand in at the same time. Others seem to conceal their light, whether out of fear or shyness or prudence, the kind of people Jesus advised:

Don’t hide your light under a bushel.

Each member of my family has a light. My wife’s is a soft glow that seems to emanate from under her skin, kind of like the light given off when you held your hands over a flashlight as a kid—your flesh pulsed with a lovely golden red phosphorescence. My eldest son has a dazzling light, like the reflections glancing from one of those mirrored disco balls at a party. My other son is a slow burner, something molten is always smoldering behind his eyes. Watch out when he erupts. And my daughter is like a firework, one with a very short fuse that is always showering sparks; she never really goes out, just sometimes shines more, sometimes shines less.

It’s not easy to see your own light. And it can be a hindrance. It’s difficult to radiate if you’re standing in your own light, checking on your luminescence. You cast too many shadows. And whatever light you have, you always have to tend it, feed it, make sure it doesn’t go out, make sure it doesn’t get swallowed up by neighboring blazes. I used to have a preference for distant fires; they are always so hopeful. But it’s impossible to warm yourself beside them. And it’s very hard to keep them going; you have to forage far and wide for kindling. Much better to have a roaring fire close to home, I think. Pile the logs up high and let them burn. That way you can see clearly what you are doing, while the glow tends to attract like-minded folks. And there’s always an extra light to give to people in the street.

Few writers can claim to have invented an entirely new form of literature, but Ramon Gomez de la Serna was certainly one of them. Born in the Rastro district of Madrid, Ramon (as he was invariably known) devised greguerias–acute observations of everyday life tinged by his surrealistic wit and then distilled into brief, aphoristic insights. In one of his several autobiographies, he says he coined the term greguerias (which means an irritating noise, gibberish or hubbub) around 1910. He was visiting Florence in that year, gazing at the river Arno from his hotel window, when he suddenly imagined that the banks of the river wanted to swap sides. This kind of whimsical perception became characteristic of his aphorisms. He even devised a formula for their creation: metaphor + humor = greguerias. He dubbed his peculiar writing style ramonismo. One of his characteristically arresting aphorisms has to do with helping a blind person cross the street:

After helping a blind man across the road, we remain slightly undecided.

I recently helped a blind woman across the road and was struck by how accurate Gómez de la Serna’s observation is. I was walking back home from the local shops when I saw an elderly blind woman picking her way along the pavement. Construction was going on up and down the street so the woman with her white stick was constantly coming up against barriers and piles of bricks. I caught up with her and offered to lead her through the construction zone and across the street. She gratefully accepted, took my hand and we set off slowly towards the corner.

Helping a blind person has to be one of the most intimate casual encounters you can have with a complete stranger in the street. If you think about a typical day, how many times do you actually touch a stranger? Very rarely, if at all. The only experience that comes close is exchanging money in a shop. Then your hand may brush the hand of the person behind the counter, but observe how careful you both are to make sure that your fingers do not touch. Admitting a stranger into your personal space, allowing him or her to touch your skin, is not undertaken lightly.

This is why helping a blind person across the street is so intimate, and part of the reason it leaves you undecided. I held the lady’s hand and we made very slow progress up the street. Her hand was very soft and wrinkled and slightly cold. There we were, it would be some time before we reached the corner, so I thought I should start a conversation. So for the remainder of our journey we made small talk—about the neighborhood, about how there always seemed to be construction going on—and I periodically gave her updates about where we were and how far we had to go the corner. Finally, we crossed the street and I pointed the lady in the direction she wanted to go and we said goodbye. I resumed my walk home.

I didn’t get but a few meters down the street, when I stopped and turned back to look at the lady. Had I taken her far enough? Would she make the rest of her trip alright? Should I have asked if there was anything else she needed? I was undecided. Just those few moments we walked together had created a kind of intimacy, a camaraderie, and I was now unsure if I had done enough for her.

Gómez de la Serna wrote thousands and thousands of greguerías. Each of his aphorisms is both profound and comical; no event is so trivial that it does not contain some kernel of humor or wisdom or an unexpected insight:

Ants rush about as though the shops were just closing.

The giraffe is a horse elongated by curiosity.

How quickly they pack suitcases in films!

Now, reading Gómez de la Serna always leaves me slightly undecided. Am I really seeing what’s going on around me? Do I need to add a little more metaphor and humor to my life? Am I making the most of all the hubbub?

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928, Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it—especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.

About 20 years ago, I was poking around a used bookstore in San Francisco when I spied the following title on the chipped and battered spine of a dust jacket-less hardback: Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing. With a name like that, I thought, it had to be good. So I bought it immediately; I think it cost $2.00. When I took the book home and started reading, I discovered some of the funniest, most philosophical and aphoristic poems I had ever encountered. The author was a man by the name of Samuel Hoffenstein, whom I had never heard of. In the 1920s, though, when this book was first published, he was one of the most famous American light versifiers. Six months after it appeared in 1928,Poems in Praise of Practically Nothing had sold some 90,000 copies, an astonishingly high figure for a book of poetry. Hoffenstein is a master of the mundane, creating poems that make a lot out of what seems like very little.

Hoffenstein’s verse is witty, irreverent and poignant. The titles of individual poems—“Songs about Life and Brighter Things Yet; A Survey of the Entire Earthly Panorama, Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral, With Appropriate Comment by the Author, of a Philosophic, Whimsical, Humorous, or Poetic Nature—a Truly Remarkable Undertaking” and “Songs of Fairly Utter Despair”—are often rewarding little poems in themselves. Hoffenstein treats life’s triumphs and tragedies with a teasing humor and a powerful sense of the transience of things. He always manages to find a big idea in the little transactions of daily life:

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;—
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

I always find Hoffenstein inspiring when inspiration seems in short supply. I was talking to a friend recently, who is working on a novel, and she said she wasn’t making any progress because she didn’t feel inspired. This launched us into a lengthy conversation in which I tried to make the point that inspiration is overrated.

There was a time when I thought that inspiration was everything when it came to writing, and I enthusiastically pursued various routes to induce that state when it was reluctant to come about of its own accord. But it seems to me now that inspiration, while it has its uses, is probably the least important thing about writing. Much more vital, in my view, is simply doing it — especially when you’re feeling least inspired. Writing is a job, just like being an accountant, a bricklayer or a school teacher. If your accountant said to you, ‘I’m not doing your taxes before the deadline because I don’t feel inspired,’ you’d look for another accountant pretty quick. I feel the same way about writing. I hardly ever feel inspired. If I waited for that elusive feeling to descend upon me, I’d never get anything done. So after I roll out of bed in the morning, I roll into my study, sit down before a blank screen and start writing—whether I feel inspired or not. And to my delight and amazement, something worthwhile usually gets written.

Thomas Edison coined one of the best ever aphorisms about inspiration:

Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

I think what Edison said about genius applies to creativity, too. Inspiration is a lovely feeling. Those eureka moments—when the solution to a problem suddenly comes to you out of the blue, when the perfect words in the perfect order just seem to flow effortlessly out of you—are precious. But they are by definition fleeting, and it’s difficult to build much of substance on such evanescent foundations. So I look to that great sage Nike for my philosophy about writing: Just do it. My experience has been that writing is the mother of inspiration, not the other way around. It’s sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. After the drudgery of practicing day in and day out for a very long time, one day you find you’re making really sweet music. Inspiration has very little to do with it. And the most inspiring thing of all about this is, something interesting always turns up as long as you’re always willing to keep digging. What that even greater sage Marcus Aurelius said about goodness also applies to creativity:

Delve within; within is the fountain of good, and it is always ready to bubble up, if you always delve.