I’ve taken my own advice. Since Friday morning I’ve been doing morning pages again. I’ve done them four mornings in a row now, and I can feel the ice starting to break a bit. Mostly I’ve been complaining on paper, but my pen will sometimes lead me down interesting alleyways. It’s thought-by-writing. No solutions to anything yet, but it lets me vent, and at least I know that I’ve already done something productive before breakfast.

I’ve almost finished reading Cloud Atlas, one of the weirdest and coolest novels I’ve ever read. To describe it is to ruin it. Just trust me that’s it’s a great (and at times challenging) read.

I sometimes wonder if reading is just a distraction from writing. I tell myself it’s useful, that it can give me ideas and inspiration and fuel. But the truth is that reading is easier than writing. And it’s also more interesting. But it’s consumption instead of production. Last year there was a kerfuffle over a report by the NEA stating that reading among Americans is at an all-time low. That’s bad; reading trains the mind. Or does it? Maybe reading doesn’t cause intelligence and it’s just that intelligent people are the only ones who read.

I was trying to find this Ralph Waldo Emerson quote about how books are actually bad for you. With the help of Google (a brain’s best friend!), I found this, which pretty much says what I wanted to say.

Even the great books, says Emerson, fail to deliver on their promise. “Come, they say, we will give you the key to the world.” Each poet, each philosopher says this. But we never get to the center. What we must draw on is our own experiences. Write our own sentences. And read Emerson. …

… The golden sentences in Emerson should inspire us. They will help us understand our own experience. They may express it better than we ever will. But we cannot stop there. We must have our own thoughts, make our own sentences. …

This is why writers have a love-hate relationship with books. We read books looking for that sudden revelation of truth and by doing so delay revealing our own. “To put away one’s original thought in order to take up a book,” writes Schopenauer, “is a sin against the Holy Ghost.”

There you go. A love-hate (or at least love-annoyance) relationship with books. I’ll finish this book, and then, instead of finding another one, maybe the one that will solve everything, why not just sit down and write?

Instead of passively consuming, actively produce.