Go and Do It
The best thing about full-time magazine writing was the shoeleather reporting. It got me away from the computer and out into the wild. But as the magazine industry shrank to what it is now, that kind of journalism stopped getting funded. Magazines – the ones that are left, tight-fisted since all the ad revenue is in jeans of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergei Brin – still need words, but they have no budget to send stringers anywhere. And hey, anything you need to research is available online now anyway, right?
OBD was hatched, in part, so I could feel that feeling again.
For a writer, there is simply no substitute for what the Japanese call genchi genbutsu – going to see for yourself. You can never truly understand something unless you immerse yourself in that milieu, lap up as much of the experience as you can through your senses.
Olga understood this. It’s why she sat me down one day and said, “Look, if this book’s going to be any good, you’re going to have to not just observe my world of master’s track but participate in it. The Worlds are coming up in Sacramento. You have to enter.” (Turned out she was right about that, like so much else.)
When the historian and writer David McCullough was working on his biography of Harry Truman, he zeroed in on the precise moment when Truman became president – the night FDR died. Truman, then VP, was at home in his apartment on Connecticut Ave when he got a call from a senator telling him he was needed at the White House. What’s up? Just get down here.
The events that followed, McCullough could have adequately described them from available letters. But he wanted to grok what it felt like to be Truman in that moment. So he put in a request to the Senate archive. He learned that Truman stopped by his office to get his hat, then made a beeline to Pennsylvania Ave. McCullough learned the exact route Truman took. And, then, just like Truman on that night, he ran it.
That extra-mile-ism – literally – informed McCullough’s understanding of the president. McCullough discovered that there were a lot of stairs en route that Truman bounded up; the president must have been in better shape than McCullough would have guessed. That level of detail didn’t necessarily make it into the book, but it informed McCullough’s understanding of his quarry. McCullough could have stayed in his office and written a pretty good biography. But by taking his curiosity out into the physical world, getting his own body involved in the hunt, he wrote a great one.
The author Ryan Holiday, who dug up this anecdote, suggests that this is an important dimension of actual wisdom. Wisdom isn’t just acquired from reading a lot; it’s the accumulated physical sensory experience of every place you’ve visited through the years. This reminds me of something the filmmaker Werner Herzog once said: it’s important for artists – for anyone, really – to have an “image bank.” When you’re housebound for too long, your image bank becomes depleted, and it’s time to hit the bricks and get the old genchi genbutsu going again.
Not long ago the CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria was discussing how it’s only out in the field – talking to people in bars, sniffing the grapeshot – that he comes to understand the “on-the-ground truth.” One time Zakaria found himself sitting on a plane next to the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Stan Fisherman. Zakaria asked him why he was making the trip; presumably, as an economist, he already had all the data at his fingertips. That’s true, Fisherman said, but it’s not the same. “I find that every time I go on one of these trips, within 24 hours I realize that my previous assumptions about this place are wrong. There’s always something I learn on the ground about why the policies we were thinking about won’t work, or there’s some cultural issue or some political issue.” The IMF boss continued, “You still have to look at data and other things. But if you don’t have that … the Germans call it fingerspiel — the knowledge of your finger — you’re missing something very important.”
Fingerspiel!
There’s a lot of that in Brad Gooch biography Rumi’s Secret, which I recently devoured while working on a piece about the 13th century Sufi mystic poet. It’s astonishing the lengths Gooch went to slip into Rumi’s skin. There had been other biographies of Rumi, some of them very good. But Gooch went leagues further. He buried himself in the texts. He taught himself Arabic and Farsi so he could understand the poems in the original tongue. Then he mapped out the 2,500 miles Rumi travelled in his peripatetic life, and traced the route himself. Gooch chased Rumi along the old Silk Road, into Iran, Damascus, Uzbekistan, and finally to Konya, Turkey, where Rumi lived out the rest of his life. All that metaphorical mileage shows. In a sense Gooch was doubling up, through his own approach, on the thirst for meaning, the spiritual quest that was Rumi’s whole jam.
It’s good to get out of the chair once in awhile. There’s a far field, out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing and asking for answers from Claude.
Meet you there.
(Ivan Gromakov photo, via Unsplash.)
