Future Failure, or Esprit de L’Escalier
“[O]ne has only learnt to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it” —T.S. Eliot
The doing and thinking required to write and revise means that writers are constantly calculating the output of their subtractions and additions.
We’re counting on precision, but there is no exact answer. We can’t use perfect words; we can only use words that serve the moment. But, blink, and, as Eliot points out, that particular moment has passed. Those words, “shabby equipment always deteriorating,” which were so apt, are already wrong.
The attempt to fix moments in time, with words, frequently feels impossible and pointless. This discomfort can coalesce into an unmovable obstacle, encountered by some as writer’s block.
Writer’s block does not mean that you’ve failed. It means that you’ve stumbled onto the failure of words.
Such failure is constitutive of language because language is not commensurate with meaning. Our words always say less (and sometimes more) than what we mean. We can never really say just what we want to say–first because we don’t always know exactly what it is we mean, and second, because if we do, we don’t usually have the just-right words to convey it.
In other words, our thoughts and words can’t coordinate precisely. Writing lets us pretend otherwise by offering itself as a tool for facilitating closer connection. But its mechanism merely extends the variable of time, which magnifies imprecision.
There’s a solution to this problem, but it’s not without remainder. We must free ourselves from the tyranny of exactness by acknowledging our future failure. It’s not a personal shortcoming: It’s a consequence of communication, which is only approximate.
Similarly, esprit de l’espalier. is linguistic melancholy. The perfect words–like the perfect comeback–often only arrive (if they arrive at all) when the moment has passed.
We can still write, we just have to tolerate that it’s almost always wrong.