On profundity.

Why is it so hard to write something profound?

It takes a minimum of four separate Word documents for me to write an essay. One document for each step of my writing process—brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and revising. I could do everything on a single document, but I am afraid that somewhere along the line I might delete the perfect string of words and never have the ability to put it back together ever again; with four separate documents, all of my thoughts (messy and organized) are archived and protected from the malicious backspace.

In my mind, writing something profound is always accidental and never reproducible.

I believe everyone thinks profound things all the time. But writing profound things is entirely different. There is something headache-inducing about having to cram a multi-dimensional idea into a one-dimensional array of words. There are probably infinitely many profound non-Euclidean connections that happen in the brain that get lost simply because they are difficult to articulate. But the connections are there, and they’re meaningful somehow, at least to the individual making them.

It’s like what Nakata does in Kafka on the Shore. “Eel = knife = Johnnie Walker?”¹ Does this make sense to anyone who hasn’t read the novel? Probably not. It might not even make sense to people who have read it. Maybe the only person this connection makes sense to is Haruki Murakami. And it took him an entire novel to attempt to contextualize it.

What about profundity that is projected? Sometimes the profound connections are made external to the individual. In these cases, it’s not hard to be profound at all.

Last year, my friend and I were complaining about our midterms. He said, “I wish I didn’t have to take my exams. I just want to go live on a farm somewhere with cats.” I replied in a stupid voice, “But there are bugs on da farm!” He said, “That was so profound. It’s like, there’s no perfect utopia.” We laughed about it. I was just trying to be weird and funny. But I guess it could be profound. He wants to escape his imperfect life (one riddled with midterms) and run away to a perfect one (on an idealized cat farm). But there are bugs on da farm.² In an instant, I’ve written something profound.

But I’ve noticed that this kind of profundity never lasts. If the profundity comes from a source external to the individual and is instantaneously understandable, it must be built upon a fundamental structure that can be easily understood by more than one person. Isn’t it impossible for this structure to be unique? If you think about it, “But there are bugs on da farm” is an iteration of the moral of Freaky Friday, the intention of the idiom “the grass is always greener,” and the revelation at the end of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library.³ This is cliché disguised as profundity.

So I guess we are back again at square one. It is still hard to write something profound. How can it not be? I am trying to express a unique set of abstract connections that may have never been articulated before. And all I have are the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

Have I written anything profound so far?

I wanted my first post on here to be something profound. I started a Substack—I must have something profound to say! But everyone always has profound things to say. It’s just hard to say them. My mind already hurts from squashing itself into these words. I guess there is something significant in the fact that this was written in a single post. There were no separate documents for each step of the writing process.

So maybe at some point there was, in fact, something profound written on here. But I probably deleted it.

1. I love allusions. I think they are so useful for conveying a multi-dimensional idea with one-dimensional words. If I reference Oedipus Rex, I am referencing the story of the king who killed his father and married his mother, sure. But I am also referencing the themes of hubris, fate, prophecy, and blindness. All of this crammed into a single reference to the Greek tragedy.

2. This friend and I continue to reference this conversation. Whenever one of us complains about something going on in our lives and says we’d rather be living a different one, we remind ourselves that there are bugs on da farm.

3. Ha! More references.