The first bit of Diary behind a paywall, second half of a page about nothing - about what nothing isn’t - doesn’t seem to have caused either mass subscriptions or mass unsubscriptions. I’m usually getting over a third opens, within a few hours. This then gradually increases during the following two or three days. At least this first Inserted Page signals to paid subscribers that there are bits only for them.
Yesterday’s page was one of the ones I most enjoyed writing, because I was able to think of descriptions for subatomic goings-on. I was also thinking of the academic paper about the physical basis for consciousness, which I read after getting halfway through that very badly written book on Emergence.
On Facebook I asked friends (writers) what the smallest thing they’d ever written about was. Atoms, a lot said. No-one said muons or gluons.
When I do the Powers of Ten exercise with Creative Writing students, after watching the Eames Office video, I always notice what a small band of scale fiction deals with. As soon as you reduce cities to grids or see white and red blood cells, it’s only rare sentences about leukemia or smog that are likely to occur. The cosmic and the atomic are embarrassments to the usual New Yorker short story - or humiliations. But as I’m trying to say, we have involvements and even possibly entanglements on these levels.
Similarly with slow-motion, paused or geologically-sped-up time. What’s human becomes imperceptible, but we’re still smearily or flashingly present even if not there. This isn’t going to change how anyone writes, although it might one day make someone realise what they’re ignoring. What they’re ignoring is most of everything, all kinds of it.
I am amazed what has become available to human knowledge, and yet how uninformed we are, and how we concern ourselves so much with picnics.