I’ve been thinking about how to pitch this column for some time, but have presently decided to give up. The reason for this is that I don’t really have a premise to introduce.
It is unnecessary for a personal column to commit to a single subject, but it is usual for even the most meandering of these to provide, at their commencement, a raison d’etre. Whereas, once, it was considered standard to produce an entire first instalment lingering on the writer’s reasons for presuming their thoughts profound enough to be made public, it has become more popular nowadays to expound shortly and precisely on one’s intentions. As for myself, I faced the challenge of expounding so shortly and so precisely on my intentions that two attention-grabbing sentences should suffice. Three sentences, if the idea I chose to express first was so complex I worried the masses simply would not be able to catch up lest I explained myself at length.
Having reflected on the question, I am at a loss. I don’t know how to explain the conceit of this column. I don’t know, at all, what I’m going to write until I do it – no concept is so enrapturing as execution itself. The subject itself hardly matters. The process of putting words to feelings, especially common feelings that echo back and forth between pages written by me and pages written by others, almost as though echoing between the walls of our heads like big, spacious, interconnected caverns, is very enjoyable. Words to sensations I’ve not previously heard expressed, too, are an achievement. But the conceit of this column is neither of those things. If I had one at all, it would be a conceit – not a focal subject, or a series of topics to be systematically dealt with. It would be a fanciful, guiding principle, somehow managing abstraction and over-specificity at the same time. And, instead of one principle, I would be guided by many.
Firstly, when I myself am the reader, I do not like the author to address me directly. So I would abstain from use of the second person, that over-familiar “you”. Never mind that my too-frank choice of tone has already, haughtily, presumed an audience – my will alone, no matter how forceful, could not purge you from the world. You are here, so I will just ignore you, instead. I mean, if that’s alright. I think it the best way forward. It permits us both a degree of freedom: I can write as though no one is reading, all the while presuming that my words will find eyes eventually; as for you, you can choose to read, or you can choose not to, neither choice at any cost to you, and neither case a deterrent to me.
Secondly, I would do away with any sort of introduction and begin straight away with paragraph one. This second principle presents some difficulties. It seems, after all, that I love to write introductions just as much as I abhor reading them. My childhood diaries each begin with an expository chapter where I name the members of my family, number the walls of the house where I live, describe the sights and sounds exhaled by the window nearest me, and enumerate in bullet-point form my current goals and aspirations. It is easier to proclaim that you are just about to start something than it is to actually start. Sorry – it is easier for me to proclaim. But I am here dealing with the hypothetical form taken by my conceit, if I had one, and so it is forgivable if I should not actually adhere to it in the course of explaining it. I owe it no loyalty, for it has given me nothing.
Thirdly, I would not waste a moment in justifying myself. It is far too easy, far too common, and far too damaging to open oneself to criticism by suggesting one deserves it to begin with. A succinct and marketable premise might have been useful if I were, in writing a column, trying to capture something that was in itself succinct and marketable. That is not what I am trying to do. I realise, whenever, after hours of self-absorption, of page-turning, of pen-flicking, and of observation, I at last put my nib to paper, that my goal is to write about something with a very different nature indeed. Not one thing, but a whole host of things; of subtle things that occur quietly and go unnoticed, and things that introduce themselves less quietly, but are relegated quickly to the background of sight and sound. When put to paper, observations of this kind can appear too self-absorbed; they can be inward-looking, and presume to be full of mystique that is merely disguised anticlimax. But I do not treat them that way. I cannot treat them that way. They play such a central part in my life that to reduce them would be disingenuous.
In this column, then, having no conceit, I propose to do something like this. I propose to sit quietly, but sometimes to speak, and observe, but sometimes to act upon, my own life. Most of life is mundane. This is an inescapable truth for all people, except for something strange which occasionally happens. Occasionally, in the regular course of my life, something interesting will happen, be said, or be brought about by my actions. Usually, when this comes about, I will think about the interesting thing for some time. I will then sit down and put the nib of my pen to paper and write.
And then words will pour forth as though the echo is transcribing itself, wants to be transcribed. The sensation is nothing at all like writing an essay, or at least, most of the time, essays are nothing at all like that sensation. There are some aspects, now and again, of the mundanity that forms every day, which lend themselves to more than feeling. They lend themselves to being written about. It is the same feeling as turning on an old-looking garden tap and feeling fresh, cold water gush forth as though alive and eager.
The purpose of this column is to find, within the clear, grey skies of mundanity, the many pinpricks of colour that are so interesting that they are well worth writing about. Or, perhaps, the purpose of this column is to find that there is no such thing as mundanity, that everything relegated to the realm of the mundane is in fact just as colourful. I do not know, and I will not know, until I have seen it and written it down.