A Bone For the Mind

“My writing is done in railroad yards, while waiting for a freight, in the fields while waiting for a truck, and at noon after lunch,” he explained in a 1941 letter to Miss Anderson. “Towns are too distracting. Now and then I take a day off to ‘put myself in order.’ I go through the notes, pick and discard. The residue is usually a few paragraphs. My mind must always have something to chew on. I think on man, America, and the world. It is not as pretentious as it sounds.” His usual method was simply to take a single idea and work it out in his mind, put down the result in fifty words or less, and then go on to something else. — Calvin Tomkins, Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey I don’t want to alarm anyone, but I was a distracted driver for many years. Oh, I don’t mean that I was watching YouTube videos behind the wheel or anything. But I used to drive hundreds of miles a day for work, and most of my writing was done in my head, sometimes with a song on repeat, putting me in something…