Today – but not just today – I’m at a loss for words. I’m not talking about the several hundred in this post that failed to elude my grasp, but the ones that remain in their hideouts. It’s not the best of news for a writer, but I sometimes have trouble nowadays locating certain words. These elusive words live in my brain but evade my search, hiding in obscure neural pathways, under synaptic rocks or bushes, only to emerge much later – often too late for useful application in, say, a sentence. They shame me (and themselves) by their tardiness. 

I cut my teeth as a writer by doing book reviews, mostly of nonfiction works. It was both enjoyable and, in hindsight, a good idea. My book-reviewing days are now over, for multiple reasons. I’ve moved on, first to writing books and then to essays. I value cultural criticism in all its forms but didn’t particularly enjoy criticizing bad writing or bad books; and my aversion was compounded by a particularly bad, and unfair, review of one of my own books. Writers are like that. 

Readers of this blog are a hearty breed. You already have one of the main prerequisites for being a critical thinker: a tolerance for deeper thinking. Others would say that my head is in the clouds (where I must say I have excellent company, philosophical and otherwise). But these critics always remind me of the doltish New York Times reporter who sneered at President Bill Clinton for “airy theorizing” when Clinton talked about the decline of the nation-state.