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This month’s email to Friends is from senior editor Marina Benjamin

Marina Benjamin is a writer of memoir and non-fiction. Most days, she’s bonded to the computer, quarrying words and polishing them up, and only occasionally glancing up to take in the trees beyond the window or grab a snack from the kitchen. Her latest memoir Insomnia will be published this fall.

How I work and what I’ve been enjoying lately

I still boggle thinking back to 2012, when Paul and Brigid Hains first breathed life into Aeon, and the idea of drawing people into a deep engagement online (the ‘deep dive’ as opposed to ‘surfing’) was practically anathema. It’s as if, just a few years ago, we occupied another era. But then the attention economy is a fluid thing and reading habits are not fixed. They are as protean as trends in writing: in fact, I think that reading and writing perform a kind of dance, co-evolving and blurring; now together, now apart.

I feel the same about writing and editing. Received wisdom suggests the two are twinned, that one bleeds fruitfully into the other, but I’m not so sure that as tasks they can easily be separated. When you are writing your brain is already editing, before, during and after the words hit the page, and when you are editing – particularly in the interventionist mode we practise at Aeon, where as editors we make a huge empathetic leap into a draft essay, engaging with it at the level of ideas and language at once – then at the deepest structural level, you are also writing. Rather than qualifying as separate functions, writing and editing are more like different modalities, or gears: the brain, in its perpetual motion, invents and critiques in synchrony.  

I’ll confess to being a nerd about craft and therefore a glutton for reading writing about writing. My staple fare consists of magazines like Lit Hub, the London Review of Books and The Paris Review. I also love BBC Radio 4’s Open Book (writers talking about writing) and John Mitchinson and Andy Miller’s gloriously irreverent podcast series Backlisted (more writers talking about writing). Books about the craft are equally appetising. Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir (2015) and Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing (2013) are generous, erudite, engrossing. Stephen King, in On Writing (2000), acquaints readers with a sensitive, expansive side of himself, so unlike the horror writer’s persona. In a single breath, King can talk about being hit by a lorry and broken almost to pieces, and about being a jangler of keys in a many-roomed mansion where any number of magical doorways might be opened. Of course, all the time I am feeding my writerly soul I am also sharpening my editor’s knives!    

Currently I’m reading another writing memoir, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018), which blends self-effacing, therefore supremely winning, anecdotes with sure-footed knowledge about writing. Chee confides: ‘There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.’ I know just what he means. It’s more than the high you get from pinning down an evanescent thought. It’s the unanticipated satisfaction that springs out of bringing something new into the world – a new configuration or novel arrangement; the electric charge of the thing that’s never been said quite that way before. The way you surprise yourself in the process of finding it.  

Perhaps it’s because I believe that writing and reading are likewise merely different gears that I’m pulled to commissioning essays that mine the varied ways readers habitually insert themselves into story: Katherine May uncovering how much serialisations have in common with gossip, for example, or Claire Fuller exploring how writers navigate the ‘reading gap’ – that liminal space that is so potent for the reader’s imagination. One of the most unusual essays I’ve worked on in this vein is Anna Wilson’s critical reflection on the active reading she learned to apply to truculent medieval texts as a result of writing erotic fanzines.    

In what now seems like another life, I studied the history and philosophy of science, a subject that was not, as you might suppose, a kind of indenture to the scientific canon, or rote learning of a string of discoveries that eventually led to the encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world that we hold today, but the very opposite. It was a picking apart of what at any given time counted as knowledge; a refusal to accept the a priori nature of natural facts; and a rigorous application of sociological methods to the behavioural practices of scientists and their communities. I cannot think of another subject able to bequeath students a healthier degree of skepticism.

The legacy of that education, insofar as it relates to my work at Aeon, is the attitude that knowledge is provisional. Few scientists or artists pepper their lives with official paper trails; their ideas develop unformulated, unfinished, scrawled in notebooks or the backs of envelopes, or they’re sparked in conversations with peers. Just one version makes publication. Most of their art is transient. Nor is knowledge linear: the birth of an idea is not a single act but one of many, recurrent and ongoing, growing and decaying, ideas that run in and out of each other in the foment of a wider culture. Aeon essays are uniquely equipped to capture this kind of intellectual flux. By accepting that ideas are living things their task is to identify points of landing in a longer journey, the destination of which is always subject to change. So: we never run one definitive piece on the nature of consciousness – or AI, or the history of mathematics. We run a dozen. We circle a subject from every angle, zooming in to capture a particular tendency or dimension that shows itself at a particular place or time.

I have just finished editing – and you’ll soon be able to read – an essay by Cody Delistraty that asks if anything more than random chance lies behind the most startling coincidences – the kind that seem to resonate profoundly in ways we simply cannot fathom. I’m also working with Katherine May on an upcoming essay about ‘the double empathy problem’: that is, the kind of mind-blindness that leads autistic and neuro-typical people to view each other as alien. I’m hoping to work again with Margaret Wertheim – so clear-sighted on the complexities of mathematical dimensions, but this time she’ll be reflecting on the rise of big data.

Yes, essays come and go in a constant production line, but the best ones often linger, like a scent or an old friend. Or something shiny you happened to find in your pocket then decided to keep.  

New! Aeon Edition 9

In the ninth Aeon Edition, we have Pam Weintraub on epigenetics and how the sufferings of one generation are passed on to the next; Tim Whitmarsh on race in ancient Greece and the Homeric poems; Shahidha Bari on the puzzle of beauty; Sam Haselby on the end of American patriotism, and more.

Download it here.

 

Marina Benjamin

Senior Editor

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