Writing is Magic; Machine Writing is Ash

A year’s membership in the Premium Newsletter for €50 €25 EUR (price includes VAT, where applicable) A couple of years ago I found some of the old journals I’d kept when I was a teenager. Some of the thoughts in it were innocuous and silly. Some of them were heavier – had a weight I still carry with me today – especially the passages I wrote when I was hospitalised for a summer. None of it’s great writing. But all of it helped at the time. Taking thoughts and putting them down into writing helped clear them, structure them, and turned them into a foundation I could build on. It helped me deal with crises and changes. The magic of writing is this ability to witness the thought process, where somebody has used the piecemeal of words and sentences to turn incoherence into structure. Where once there was little more than anxiety and an idea, there was now understanding. Even when it’s your own writing, the thoughts that prompted the writing are long gone – “the past is a foreign country”…