Writing Wednesday: Writing and Hope

I’ve been thinking (albeit in a moderately unhinged way) about whether academic (or maybe better conventional) writing is something useful these days. I’m not trying to invoke tired arguments about whether people read academic writing (or any long form writing for that matter), but to ask whether the act of writing in the world today makes sense.

A buddy of mine once told me that he had stopped writing because writing requires hope and he has no hope.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about fragments, but I find myself struggling to understand whether there is value to reconciling these fragments. Maybe, in this day and age, fragments should be left as fragments. After all, if our writing should represent some form of our collective experience, maybe fragments are an appropriate way to express reality.

Alternately, is our traditional interest in reconciling the fragments with one another to create something coherent — and argument or a narrative — somehow vaguely utopian? Is this an appropriate time for such fantasies (or delusions)? Does this require a degree of hope that appears absent today?

Are fragments themselves worth preserving, presenting, and publishing? I’ve experimented with this before.

I’m in a faculty writing group, which I very much enjoy, but the more I think about my writing, the more I wonder whether my efforts to reconcile fragments is somehow disingenuous or duplicitous. It represents a world that we wish we had or could have and that presupposed the existence of hope.

I may be that we recognize that writing is simply a way to get a raise, gain some professional prestige, or simply spend time. Maybe it’s a hobby or a habit. Or, more sentimentally, writing might be a form of nostalgic escapism reminding us that there was a time when we expected things to make sense. While none of these things are inherently bad, I do wonder whether they are enough.