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When I try to push all of my focus into one pursuit, one piece of writing, my focus pushes itself back out, like a toddler who does not want to take a nap. “The Internet! New tabs! New information! Email! Check it!” it screams, the little brat. And so I don’t focus, never focus, live in unfocused state filled with desire for focus. But what is focus — if it is anything for a vague, unspecific abstraction of an underlying cognitive state. I can only think of Kierkegaard: “the purity of heart is to will one thing.” Focus is purity of heart, singularity of will, or the words of Malebranche: “a kind of prayer.”
Whenever I read novelists from the golden age of the “systems” novel — Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo — I think that, while they’re wonderful, there’s something a little dated about these novels, these proliferating, picaresque monsters of paranoia. The problem with writing about the madness of the present is that the present is always a little blind. The novel of Pynchon’s that holds up the best, in my opinion, for instance, is Mason/Dixon — historical, though unusual fiction. I note this as a warning to myself: a great hater of the present age.
Philosophers seem to do better as critics of the present than novelists. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Danish society in 1848 is far more relevant to me than Sinclair Lewis.
