Three Texts by Gabriel Blackwell

SELECTED LETTERS (IN WHICH I GIVE UP)

Because, before the . . . accident, I used to teach writing, and because, even before that, I studied writing, I know there is this very popular idea that economy in writing is important above all. According to this view of things, if, in trying to communicate some idea or feeling, one writes a paragraph where one could just as easily have written a sentence, the paragraph will be seen as wasteful and superfluous. I would, I remember, be very conscious I was repeating myself on the days I chose to teach this principle (and I could not have chosen not to teach it; it was embedded in every textbook on writing)—conscious because of course I was not, in those moments, modeling such economy myself, though this was, in my case, out of necessity, because my students were surreptitiously looking at their phones, or thinking about lunch, or making plans for later—in other words, imagining their lives outside of class. It is easy to see, I would tell them, how such a principle might scale up: If one writes a book where one could just as easily have written an article—and isn’t this the genesis of most books? a single idea that then gets elaborated upon?—one has wasted the reader’s time. (There is, I’ve found, rarely any accounting of the writer’s time; I suppose the assumption is that, if the writer has been paid for the book rather than for the article, it has been worth it, at least, to him or her or them. (I have never myself found this to be true.)) Likewise, when it comes to the article, has it really been necessary? Perhaps the idea contained in that article could be perfectly well summed up in a single paragraph. Isn’t this usually the case? I guess what I mean is that, in writing, we always seem to assume the writer will be tempted to write too much, creating an unhealthy surplus, and we also assume that the reader will not want to read more than is absolutely required, and we therefore assume that the goal of writing is simply to disseminate summarizable data (can feelings be summarized?), and that this is the only goal of writing. The problem, I never told my students, is that this same principle never fully makes sense when scaling down: We may accept that a paragraph containing the same general information as an article is preferable to the article and that a sentence having the same relationship to a paragraph is better than the paragraph, but we really must stop there. Beyond that point . . . I think very possibly under sedation or at any rate still groggy from the drugs—I remember I felt nauseous the entire time, and worried I might lose control of my faculties—I asked my brother to bring me the Tractatus. I’d just finished reading it for the first time, having never read it before despite taking a course on Wittgenstein, Russell, and formal logic in college. In fact, I’d been assigned the book in that course twenty years before and the copy I had was the copy I’d bought from the campus bookstore—the book still had the store’s UPC sticker on it (why had I held onto this book?)—but it was merely one of many books I’d been assigned and hadn’t read at the time. Wittgenstein’s thoughts only take up about ninety pages in this edition, but the publisher, out of, one supposes, anxiety, has doubled that number by including the original German on facing pages, and then also added Russell’s introduction (Wittgenstein thought it betrayed a complete lack of understanding of what he’d written) and an index, all to bring the book up to a still-scant two-hundred pages, presumably to make it more salable. The last thing I found I remembered from . . . before, from before, was reading the book’s last line—“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”—and then thinking about sending an email to my students announcing that class would be cancelled the next day, deciding such an email was unnecessary (there would be no class, there could be no class), and then . . . but the rest is, I think, unnecessary to say.