When I started this year’s Diary, I knew it wouldn’t be the same as the first couple of years.
I decided to make each entry a mini-essay of sorts (I’ll come back to this), and to title it ‘On Whatever’.
When I say I decided, that makes it sound more calculating than it was. More accurate would be, My instinct was to…
I put a few Ons in Subject Lines of some drafts, and then sensed how I felt about them when I was away from them.
Again, this wasn’t a plan; this was just how it happened.
My alternative was Of…
If you were to look at the bookshelf to the side of my desk, which is where I keep my best loved books, you’d see that the most cracked spine belongs to the Penguin Classics edition of The Essays of Francis Bacon.
And if you were to flick it off the shelf, and open it, and look down the contents page, you’d find — which you probably know already — that his essays are titled —
Of Truth
Of Death
Of Unity in Religion
Of Revenge
Francis Bacon was, I suppose, one conscious model for this year — although I wasn’t going for such stonking subjects.
On an opposite bookshelf, where the hardbacks hang, is Montaigne’s Complete Works. Instead of of, his essays are translated as —
On Idleness
On Liars
On Cannibals
On Smells
On being a translation for the French words De, De la and Du.
But that’s a modernisation, because in John Florio’s first translation, these would be —
Of idleneffe
Of Lyers
Of the Caniballes
Of fmels and odors
The single letter difference between Of and On makes a lot of meaning.
Of, to me, suggests a scrappy gathering of whatever that writer has found out or finds useful to say about their subject.
On, by contrast, is a summary and by implication authoritative judgement on that subject. I associate it with the covers of 1990s literary magazines where you’d get the promise of Susan Sontag or George Steiner On This or That.
Last December, deciding on the form of the coming year, my instincts were resisting this. I knew I’d be writing most of the entries, as I am today, in an hour or so. Although I might have been thinking of the subject of a long time (as with yesterday’s the Desktop World — which initially contained an aside about I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter) they would be anything but judicial.
But I gave in to On because, as with the alphabetical titles of my books, it is at the very least a start. I knew how each Subject Line would begin.
Also, I could begin to make lists of future Ons.
I could begin to gather my thoughts.
And so far it has worked.
I don’t think it’s been obtrusive or literary enough to annoy anyone. Maybe I’m wrong.
But this morning, lying in bed, listening to the rain, I realised that I wasn’t thinking anything without titling it On…
In the words of Erykah Badu —
Oh, on and on and on and on…
I wasn’t thinking, I was thinking of possible Subject Lines.
That’s not how I want my head to be. I want it to be more wandering and jump cutty.
A label being glued down suggests the moth above it has already been chloroformed to death.
Which is to say, if I find this continuing, if I think my mind’s starting to appear to itself as a Francis Bacon Contents Page, you’ll see the Ons disappear abruptly.
They were never going to last into next year, anyway.
But when a tool becomes a tic, it’s time to put it back in the box.