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2. Cumulative Thinking
The point is as basic as it is key: our minds do not disclose their more elaborate and best thoughts in one go. The mind is an intermittent instrument whose ideas come out in dribs and drabs. It is capable of a few inspired moves, then falls silent and needs to rest and to lie fallow for bewilderingly long periods. We cannot think for two hours at a stretch, let alone an entire day. The mind can’t neatly follow office hours. One paragraph might be the work of a morning; an entire book of three slow years.
We tend to miss this when we encounter the thoughts of others. Because they frequently sound so composed and can be digested in an effortless stretch, we too readily imagine that these thoughts emerged in a coherent burst. We forget that a lakeful of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights.
As a result, we are often dismayed at our own desultory first efforts. Our misfortune is to look always at the final results of the thinking efforts of others, while knowing our own efforts primarily from the inside. The contrast is so great that we tend to conclude that we are incapable of anything valuable rather than that we are – quite normally and understandably – stuck. We fail to draw courage from witnessing the struggles of those we admire. What alarms us is not so much how hard the task is but how easy we imagined it might be.
To calm us down and reassure us of the inevitability of humiliation, we should pay special attention not to the books but to the manuscripts of great thinkers. The French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) reads as one of the most polished and fluent writers of any age; his thoughts appear to flow ceaselessly from one point to the next. But his manuscripts suggest a different genesis. These densely packed notebooks are filled with multiple layers of changes, side notes, reminders, suggestions; sections moved about, crossed out, revised, abandoned, taken up again and ultimately rejected. The Proust we read is an artificial voice assembled over years, not spontaneously generated in the hours that are required to read him.
Whatever his genius, Proust was not unique in his process of mental assembly. We are all incapable of bringing the best of ourselves to the fore in any compact span of time. No single moment offers us the opportunity to consider an idea with complete adequacy or from a sufficient number of angles. We need time to pass so that we can return with a mindset imbued with multiple qualities.
At any single point, we are hemmed in in terms of what we can think by what we’ve just had to eat (as St Benedict knew, we’ll be in a different mental state depending on whether we’ve had a veal escalope or some tomatoes in olive oil); the time of day (the way we think at 8 a.m. is utterly unlike the reflections of 11.30 p.m.); what we’ve recently been reading; the outlook of the people we’ve been around; the progress of our digestion; whether things have been going well or badly in a relationship, and the axis of the earth at the specific time of year (spring has its thoughts as well as its weathers). Each mental moment is favourable to certain ideas and pushes other potentially important insights into the background.
In order to carry off any moderately complicated thinking task, we should understand that, at any single moment, we won’t have access to all the ideas we need. We’ll have to set down what we can, then wait and return with the distinctive intelligence of a new mood.
What we witness in authors’ jottings is a reminder of the delays we all have to endure before we can assemble ideas into the sequence that their underlying logic demands. When we have a more accurate picture of how our thinking processes work, we will have a more helpful perspective on the difficulty of what we’re asking our brains to do. Instead of feeling that we must be fools for finding the task so hard, we will see that our troubles around building up our thoughts are not the result of any special failing on our part, but rather derive from the basic architecture of the mind. We have to counter this failing, as Proust did, with many stages of revision, addition, deletion and correction before we can arrive at the seemingly obvious, neat and clear final version. In every office or above every desk there should be an image from the messy early stages of a masterpiece to keep this basic, consoling and encouraging truth where it belongs: at the front of our sporadic, time-bound minds.
