Lessons on Composition from War and Peace
Idle Busy-ness, Distraction, and the Energy Required to Write Seriously
“He used to maintain that all human vices sprang from only two sources– idleness and superstition, and that there were but two virtues– energy and intelligence.”
–Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace1
In the past three months, I have generated thousands of email messages, a few memorandums and directives, but I have not composed anything. Forming sentences with a subject, a predicate, and appropriate punctuation, even throwing in the occasional modifier, does not constitute “writing” in any sense of that word which ought to carry any weight.
The demands of the modern workplace afford would-be writers a plethora of excuses for not undertaking serious writing. It takes only a fraction of a second for the brain to lose focus, but many minutes to refocus on a singular task. Most of us lack the solitude that enables focused writing. Productivity “tools,” such as the trademarked Office, make us feel like we are busy, even as we compose nothing. Our perceived busy-ness convinces us that we are exerting energy and making use of our intelligence in mastering these tools.
Do I have time to compose essays, a novel, or poems. Sure. Do I have something to say? I think so. So why haven’t I? Look, I’ve already resorted to schizophrenic self-questioning to articulate whatever trace of ideas may still reside within my subconscious. Consider it my symbolic kicking and screaming in resistance to the machine.
Rather, it is the tools that have mastered us. These tools increase our idleness; our unwavering belief that technological progress equates to human progress is as much a superstition as any religion.
Reading Tolstoy provides a stark reminder that writing remains a craft, not a mere instrumentality. In the epigraph I chose for this entry, Tolstoy describes the guiding philosophy of Prince Nikolay Andreivitch Bolkonsky, who instilled in his daughter the value of education and lifelong learning. The two virtues in which the Prince believed have fallen out of favor. Modern technological psychosis2 has beaten this ambition out of all but the most fortunate and curious of people.
To exert one’s energies intelligently, one must aim them at understanding how things work, why they are as they are, not merely producing output. A machine can produce more output than someone engaged in thoughtful composition, so why bother. Do what the machines cannot and presume you will not do.
The difference, then, between writing (as the term is used during the epoch of AI) and composition (as Tolstoy seemed to envision it) is this: the former measures success by quantitative output, presupposing that more output is better than less. Composition, on the other hand, is driven by a curiosity to understand, by harnessing the energy of the human spirit toward the great questions, the answers to which are not easily quantified and cannot deduced by rote programming.
We are locked in a matrix of our own making and have become convinced we can have and know it all. That knowledge will be handed to us on a platter that we can absorb, as if information were deposited in an intellectual bank account.
What, then, might dislodge us from our delusions and transport us to the Desert of the Real?3 I suspect that Tolstoy may have something to contribute here also. I still have over 1200 pages left of War and Peace. Until next time.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 2000), 92.
I deploy this term purposely and in the Burkean sense. Drawing on the earlier work of Veblen, Kenneth Burke described a technological psychosis as a variant of the occupational trained incapacity (i.e, one gets used to a process and trains themselves to become reliant on that process) that is infused with techno-utopianism (e.g., Nvidia’s stock price and the surprising faith in EdTech to fix the educational achievement gap).
This phrase was popularized by the 1999 film The Matrix and also serves as the title of a work by Slovenian philosopher (and fellow Substack writer) Slavoj Žižek.