First, usually, is the study of said area. Books are opened. Possibly, degrees conferred. Then a professional effort is launched to approach more and more closely the core of whatever it was that interested you. If it was architecture, for example, you begin to practice it and you hope that, through this proximity, you will gain entrance into the muddled core love you felt when all things technical, structural and upright merged with all things human, emotional and spacial in the world, like the feeling you may have gotten when the sun peaked around a structure while you were on an escapade with your best friend on a lazy Saturday afternoon in high school. But, as you work, though other pleasures are no doubt born and buried daily in the rise to adulthood, that particular pleasure of bottling up your favorite thing in a can and cloistering it tightly throughout your career has yet evaded you. You have studied and now you have practiced and still there is no can. There is only tasks and moments and you know you are in the vicinity but the elusive concentrate still seems to graze by you and lightly mock as it zooms past, unable to offer you a staircase for a complete climb inside.
At this point, young adults usually attempt to alleviate the vacancy by coming together with friends and discussing. Nowadays, much of this can be done online through digital social media but back just a few years ago, people still preferred to get together in bars and talk over the whole thing. Work, colleagues and ambitions.
Talking does work. Either through books or through friends in conversation, poignant explanations of the nature of life and of what we are pursuing come to the surface. Most of us have had many
Eureka moments, when either we or someone we know or have been reading seems to solve a problem we've had a question we've been harboring. It doesn't have to be a personal question. Often, it is not. It is bigger, broader and more satisfying: so that's why architecture works this way. Or doesn't. That's why I like to wake up at six rather than at 8. Oh, that's how behavioral economics controls small market. Aha moments are everywhere and they feel so satisfying that, for a brief moment, we feel as if we have arrived: we have achieved the closest proximity we have to the subject we were interested in. We have asked THE question and a satisfying answer has rung back.
But almost as soon as the words have been spoken or read, the void of distance returns. As if we were on the latter to the inside of the cave and just as we saw inside and would enter, the entire thing vanished like a mirage. So, while we still have its vision in our minds, some of us turn to writing about it. If studying a thing and practicing a thing and hashing a thing out with our friends doesn't get us completely inside it then perhaps putting what we know down on paper would.
That's solid: a piece of thinking we can at least always refer back to if we ever forget what it feels like to have put our finger on the main gist of the matter. This is sometimes called journal writing. Sometimes it is reports or emails or personal manifestos. In extreme cases, this kind of attempt turns into a book of personal philosophy or of a memoir: What I learned from my time on Wall Street. All manner of attempts are both put down on paper and consumed off the paper by readers and writers in an attempt at proximity to the situations we are curious about, knowledgeable about or longing for.
Writing works for a bit longer than talking, because, at the very least, it takes longer to produce and is, after all, physically permanent. Or can be.
But just as when you were sitting at your drawing board, enjoying moments of professional serenity, sketching beauty on paper and, the moment that you were done, your proximity to your profession vanished, just so, in the writing about it, for those who chose to do so, the moment you are finished with the effort, you are alone again. Not really an architect. Not carrying the insights you brought forth with you on your back. You are free from all the load that you have just produced, what you did not want to be free from. What, indeed, you thought that, in the exposition of, you would have more permanently weaved into the texture of your personality, a permanence that had been the object of the exercise. And, despite the very deep dive you may have taken within the study, practice, writing, reading and talking about said subject - or moment or question - at the time that you cease talking, musing, writing or practicing it, its presence disappears. At least it disappears from being attached to the surface of your skin. It becomes a subject again, to be broached at a distance, to be drawn ever closer, once again and all over, through effort and erudition.
It's as if proximity to fields of study or to the poignant moments that make professions appealing to us is tethered to a rubber band. You can pull on the rubber band and you will bring the fullness of it closer to you but as soon as you let go which you inevitably must, either to take a breath or stir the chicken or get back to work, it snaps into that distant spot that it seems to occupy, taunting you again with its remove and asking for yet another get together in which wine, conversation and maybe some napkin notes bring the satisfaction of proximity more nearby.
Possibly, fields of research have a different relationship than this to their areas of interest. If the main job, every day, is to design experiments that, through slow, measured tenure ask the questions that hold the promise of unveiling some fundamental truth about life and planet, then maybe, since the question-asking is so spread out over time, the gratification is never-ending as well. The rubber band is never snapped back because it has not yet been pulled out all the way. Yet, as pleasant as it would be not to have rebound, it must also be unsatisfying to a move at a speed that is beneficial to the collection of knowledge but not very beneficial to radical conjectures and quick answers, which our interest in climbing whole-bodied into the areas of our interest requires.
For most of the rest of us, the recourse is simply to do it again. Get together again. Go over the main points again. Was Goethe right ore was Nietzsche right. Is architecture really an art and what is the final nature of design, once and for all. Once and for all but not for all, because as soon as the party is over, so is the sense that we have solved any mysteries. As soon as we are done reading the essay and go put on our slippers for bed, we feel that, if we want to figure out that thing that the writer talked about, we must read the essay again. As if only in the act of reading, only in the act of talking, of writing of kissing do we experience the thing we are interested in and there is no sticking power to its surface. We can never walk inside it and have it stick around our body like a bag that we, from thereon out carry forth and feel permanently.
There is certainly a neuroscientific explanation for this. Some circuit is released from duty the moment you cease to engage it, being necessary for some other critical function, like keeping your balance or seeing depth. Bartenders must know all about this as patrons repeat the same stories and fixating philosophies week after week. Bartenders and wives and husbands. Friends and colleagues and children. We all know it and we still somehow think that the next time we have a chance to, we will settle the question once and for all since last time didn't seem to stick. No doubt engaging a brain circuit that, in the next moment, will be cleared for use in our swallowing of our hot wing and soda.
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