Question: How has blogging changed the art of writing?
Andrew Sullivan: Well, I think it’s changed the art of a kind of writing. I don’t think it’s done anything to change, for example, fiction or poetry, although it might. Most of those experiments have not really panned out. I do think that what it’s done with non-fiction is really destroy a particular process, which is a future-oriented process of writing, which is that you, the writer, sits down, thinks about something, has something to write, researches, polishes, edits; if he’s lucky he has someone who can read it and edit it, and then publishes it and it’s done. And there is, so every time you write, you are writing with a sense of the future of a moment when it will be completed.
Whereas when you blog, especially if you’re... you’re thinking and writing in real time, so it takes writing away from that future oriented moment of completion to a constant presentness. For me, that’s fascinating and it’s also a way in which the writer, when they’re talking about non-fiction again, fact, or the reality that they see in front of them, is a fascinating challenge. Because it means, first of all, that everything you write is provisional; because you live in a changing world and you might change your mind or facts may change. Or you may come across arguments that force you to reassess. And so, it’s really a presentness of writing, I think that I’m talking about.
For me the great... the two great writers that I actually read and studied in college were Pascal and Montaigne, and they, in a way, in two very different forms, helped me understand this kind of thing before... avant la lettre, as it were. Montaigne wrote his essays as sprawling present thoughts. Some of them even contradicted themselves. Then he wrote them, put three editions out. And in the three editions he added stuff into the text and if you go through the best translation, which is Donald Frame, you will see A, B and C. You will see this text in three dimensions. This is how he first felt, this is how he secondly reconsidered, this is his third and final version. And that suddenly gave the writing a human quality to it because, look, there is no moment in our lives that are final except death. Our thoughts are constantly in flux. In some ways this writing is truer than the conceit of a finished piece of work.
And so, this was never possible really, except by the manner that Montaigne did it or as I said, Pascal, who in his defense of the Christian religion tried to write a finished book about defending Christianity. And along the way he just wrote what are called, the "Pensées," "The Thoughts." And he never finished the book, but what we had was these selections of fragments of thoughts and ideas that he... that subsequent people put together. And I actually felt it, and still believe, it’s the greatest defense of Christianity ever written. And it was because it never tried to capture the truth of Christianity because it demonstrated a mind thinking it through incompletely all the time.
So, I’m not saying that this was something I figured out at the very beginning, but it’s certainly something that evolved, mainly because, day-by-day, was you write your opinions on a blog, you are forced to acknowledge that you misunderstood something or made a mistake or have grown up a little bit. When you’ve done it for 10 years, that’s a quarter of my life, well a little less than a quarter, but it was a quarter of my life when I started. Anybody who’s writing the same thing or think they’ve completed their evolution of thinking at one moment in time is just wrong, or has stopped thinking. And as you know, I mean well maybe on of my core philosophical political principles is that there is not stopping.
Recorded on October 12, 2010
Interviewed by Max Miller
