Stealth Mode Diaries: Walter Ong and Nick Fuentes

Print revolutions, cancelled streamers, and long-form thinking

It’s working!!!!! Having written you all last week asking for patience while I spend a few weeks in stealth mode, working on the first third of The King and the Swarm, I can report back that wow: my intuition was right that four consecutive days is a completely different thing to four scattered days with interruptions.

In Deep Work, the productivity guru Cal Newport advises that the secret of concentration is carving out blocks of time without interruption. This is generally good advice; this week’s discovery is how much more true it is, for the kind of long-form thought required to write a book. To get an argument singing over 50,000 words, rather than 2,000 or 5,000, you need to be holding a lot of pieces simultaneously just below the threshold of awareness. If you then have to turn your mind intermittently to some other subject, you then need to re-constitute all those loose pieces again, every time you resume work. And that means you spend half of each working period laying out materials all over again, in your mental workspace, which means not just that you waste time but also that you run the risk of missing those larger, deeper patterns.

I’ve spent weeks on end, bobbing about in the interrupted shallows and grasping vainly for those patterns. Not so last week. After three days reading, I rewrote the first chapter from scratch on the fourth in six hours. Reading the result back it was immediately clear: this is it. It sings. Best of all: I found the plot twist, the extra place I wasn’t expecting the argument to go. A total surprise! I’m not going to tell you what it is yet, but it brings together all those themes of technology, enchantment, and the human person, that animates my work here. I think you’ll all like it.

So thank you for your patience. Thank you to those of you opting to stick with me (if you’re sticking with me) during this first stealth mode. I’m so grateful for your support. With that, this week’s book stack is a tightly themed one, comprising three canonical twentieth-century works on mind, culture, and writing, by Walter Ong, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Marshall McLuhan - and a bonus sidebar on Charles Murray and Nick Fuentes: