“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” - Kurt Vonnegut
There’s this nagging, sometimes paralyzing, question that occasionally crops up for people building Dream Projects: Who cares?
Maybe it’s who cares about the subject you’re writing about? Or, who cares about that trip you took or that character you brought to life or that recipe from your great aunt? Who cares?
There’s this series in The Atlantic called By Heart where authors share their all-time favorite passages from literature.
In what might be the most unlikely pick in the series, author Lucas Mann chooses J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip.
The book comes from the “discreditable genre of pet lit.” (Yes, that’s a genre.) And, in case there’s any confusion, it is quite literally “a book-length essay dedicated entirely to a poorly behaved German Shepherd that Ackerley cared for more deeply than anything else in his life.”
There is actually a chapter called “Liquids and Solids.” The level of detailed observation is stunning. At one point, Ackerley describes in great detail and with a sense of great worry how the overgrown summer grass thwarts his efforts to scan for and remove shards of glass -- and he recounts the bloody consequences for the pup’s paws.
Mann says, “We feel him leaning closer, looking so carefully, and it’s the closeness in his gaze, his dedication to looking, that transforms the subject.” Then The Atlantic essay really gets good:
“We openly question if the reality of a writer’s subject is worth discussing. We prioritize a weighty topic over the force of an author’s gaze, the clarity of her prose, the sincerity of her emotion. Underneath it all runs the same droning question that plagued me as a student, and still does sometimes: Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?
Ackerley answers this simply: I do. And he goes on to give us a virtuoso performance of care. I think I keep returning to this passage, and the book as a whole, because it’s important for me to remind myself sometimes that, at its heart, that’s all a great essay is: a virtuoso performance of care.”
A virtuoso performance of care. What if that’s what we aimed for?
Mann goes on to say:
“It woke me up to the fact that spending one’s time fretting about aboutness is a deflection from the essayist’s real challenge: to think and feel as deeply and specifically as possible about whatever it is you’re looking at.”
Those are our marching orders. To think and feel as deeply and specifically as possible about what we’re looking at.
And as for the question of, “Who cares?”
You care. And that’s enough to make it an all-time favorite.
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Wow. This is fantastic. Took screenshots so I can reread often. THANK YOU!