Music and an unabashedly short attention span

What if he thought of listening to music the same way he thought of reading books? It’s strange how he would ordinarily think of an afternoon listening to music as somehow inferior to one reading a novel. Why shouldn’t he devote lots of time just listening to songs, over and over. They both carried the danger of becoming a totally passive activity. They both should be thought of as input, which if absorbed productively, will produce output which is different from the input and which machinically perpetuates the creative flux of it all.

He would watch people talking around him, get a sense of what they were saying, and then sort of let them keep going, watching their facial expressions, but not really registering what they were saying, because he was thinking through his own notions, and all of a sudden he would realize that he had been listening to the person speak without paying attention to what they were talking about, and that it didn’t matter, because he’d used what they’d talked about in the first few minutes of talking to him as a foundation for his own private flights of fancy. What right did they have to his attention? Just because he’s looking at them, nodding his head, he’s under an unspoken obligation to pay heed to what they’re going on about?

He had plans for the next few months. He liked the idea of finding himself through writing. He thought it was possible. But more so in the way of finding out what your body is capable of. He thought that that was what “finding out who you are” entailed anyways – finding out what you and your body is capable of. That is something that always comes not just as a surprise but as an opening out – when you realize you’re capable of not only engaging in an activity you didn’t see yourself capable of approaching, but mastering it. This sounds like some boilerplate self-help inspirational bullshit, but I would be surprised if most people experience this more than a few times in their life. I’m not talking about what the self-help manuals are usually talking about – going skydiving, quitting smoking, etc. Or am I? I might be churning out sentences that would feel more at home in an Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlet. To return to where this paragraph seemed like it was headed when it began, he liked the idea of finding out what he was capable of writing i.e. was he capable of writing a long fictional work? Was the answer to his question that he must simply embark? It seems that he is beginning to write fiction by writing fictionally about himself writing fiction. He was from this perspective representative of a type, not distinctive. Was he writing to be distinctive though? If he was honest with himself, he would admit that his writings were attempts to fit himself into a mould. To find out what you’re capable of through writing, however, you need to really push yourself, that is, be capable of really pushing yourself. Henry Miller, as I remember, wrote that he had written 1,000,000 words before he began his first novel. That is five and a half years of writing 500 words a day. Before he became Henry Miller.