The nature of such work

The opening paragraphs of The Unquiet Grave, a 1944 collection of aphorisms and pensées by Cyril Connolly:

The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this should be, how few writers will admit it, or having drawn the conclusion, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked! Writers always hope that their next book is going to be their best, and will not acknowledge that they are prevented by their present way of life from ever creating anything different.

Quite the opening salvo even if “an artist should always strive for his best” is not going to be a revelation to most of us, but the challenge intensifies in the second paragraph—to me the most striking passage:

Every excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda and writing for the films, however grandiose, will be doomed to disappointment. To put our best into these is another folly, since thereby we condemn good ideas as well as bad to oblivion. It is in the nature of such work not to last, and it should never be undertaken. Writers engrossed in any literary task which is not an assault on perfection are their own dupes and, unless these self-flatterers are content to dismiss such activity as their contribution to the war effort, they might as well be peeling potatoes.

This brought me up short, and not because I disagreed with it.

I recently read this review of the great film historian David Thomson’s latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies. The reviewer notes Thomson’s fame as the author of the massive and authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film—first published in 1975 and now in its sixth edition—as well as what seems to be Thomson’s steadily increasing dislike of movies: “He has come to think of cinema as the cave in the Republic. Unlike Plato’s prisoners, though, who have no real idea of what is going on in the world outside, we have willingly chained ourselves in order to avoid thinking about anything external to the self. We have let ‘the lifelike’, Thomson says, ‘distract us from life’.”

I have to agree with more than I’d like, and I’ve slowly recognized a dissatisfaction—a falling out of love, in the terms of that review—in myself with regard to the movies. I’m not sure anyone noticed, but I didn’t write a movie year-in-review for 2025. I doubt I’ll have one this year, either.

But I don’t think I’ve arrived at Thomson’s place, not least because I still love old movies. So what if the new stuff is mostly terrible?

Well, it’s the ephemerality Connolly notes that bothers me. If a cruddy movie nowadays seems like a waste of time, effort, money, and talent, how much more so when you think about what it will take to preserve that movie? Will anyone be watching movies in a thousand years? Will they be interested? Crucially, will they be able to?

The fragility and impermanence bother me, I think, because I spend so much time studying the Early Middle Ages. So little of ancient literature survived, and that thanks only to the enormous effort of anonymous copyists. Years ago in college I began to wonder just how well one of my own books would survive a similar chain of transmission. This was prompted by the unlikely duo of Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. McCarthy, of course, was a textual and punctuation minimalist. His meaning comes from the words themselves, simpliciter. Foer’s books play all kinds of postmodern typographical games. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has a multi-page spree of a single unbroken stream-of-consciousness paragraph in which the lines slowly run together until the letters and words are indecipherable and, finally, a solid block of black ink.

Suppose a collapse comes, or simply a long downturn—not a bang, but a whimper. Which author will be easier to copy? Which is easier to read now? Everything I write now I write with a view to being understandable without accurate punctuation or things like the italics used for emphasis in the previous sentence.

Even one movie relies on so much technological infrastructure that I have to assume the entire medium will be lost someday. For those of us who love movies, are they worth the time? The effort? The mental energy? Digital versions will inevitably be lost, but will the physical films become just so much Linear A, or the carbonized scrolls of Herculaneum? Assuming some future Canticle for Leibowitz society arises and is able to view them again, will even that be worthwhile?

This is worth thinking about, because Connolly betrays himself a bit in that final line. Potatoes may not last—you’ll have to grow them again, and you’ll have to eat again—but that doesn’t make them pointless. And isn’t even a masterpiece ultimately impermanent?

I have no answer to any of these things, but I’ve been more and more concerned with things that last. The digital age is the most ephemeral thing there is. Our culture is electricity. How long does a flash of lightning last? How much of it is left once it’s over? Look at YouTube, Tiktok, social media, and consider the nature of such work.