Craft

For most of my life I read Jorge Luis Borges the way you visit a cathedral you don’t belong to: hat in hand, admiring the vaulting, aware the building was not built for you. A labyrinth to walk through and describe from outside, not a voice to live inside. Something has shifted. I can’t name the culprit — age, distance from the books that once impressed me for the wrong reasons, or just enough rereading to stop performing reverence and start actually listening — but going back to him now I find him sober rather than ornate, and I catch his cadence quietly steering my own sentences: the short declarative that ends a paragraph like a door closing, the fondness for stating an impossible thing in the flattest voice available. Saying that out loud feels presumptuous. A man who built a library with no walls does not get imitated by accident, and claiming his rhythm as an influence invites the obvious question of what exactly I think I’m doing. I believe it anyway. …

In the Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the Egyptian god Theuth, inventor of writing, who brings his gift to King Thamus and asks him to distribute it to the people. Thamus refuses to be impressed. Writing, he says, will not improve memory but replace it: people will stop exercising the internal discipline of recollection and instead rely on external marks made by someone else’s hand. They will seem wise without being wise, “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” It is, as far as the historical record goes, the oldest surviving complaint against a technology for knowing things — and it is aimed, with uncanny precision, at exactly the anxiety now circulating about large language models. …

Some ideas are the wrong size for the forms available to hold them. A poem compresses too hard — you sketch the frame of a house you will never build. A book demands the opposite problem: not craft but infrastructure, a publisher, a grant, a sabbatical, a spouse able to carry the mortgage while you argue with chapter seven for two years. Montaigne solved this exact problem in the sixteenth century by inventing a form for it — the essai, literally an “attempt,” sized for an idea bigger than a stanza and smaller than a treatise, published in no particular order, revised across editions, admitting on the page that the writer had not finished thinking. It is, on paper, the perfect container for someone whose ideas don’t fit neatly anywhere else. …

In 1990, at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, there was an IEEE magazine in the library whose pages had never been cut. This was not metaphor. Before the era of perfect-bound paperbacks and digital everything, some periodicals arrived folded, signatures intact, and you had to run a knife or a finger along the edge to open each section. If the pages were still sealed, it meant no one had read it. Someone had received it, shelved it, and forgotten it. The information inside was technically available and practically inaccessible — a kind of knowledge in suspension, waiting for someone to care. …