This week marked World Book Day. I remember writing here that I was waiting for news about the publication of my first book. Well, I can finally make the official announcement: I’m going to publish my first book. The publisher, whose name I’ll reveal very soon, couldn’t be more fitting for the kind of book I’ve written. I don’t yet have the exact publication date, but there’s a strong chance it will be this year. The manuscript is practically finished, pending only the editor’s comments, after going through two rounds of revision. It will be in Portuguese and extends many of the useless ideas I’ve been sharing here.1

The first revision was one I requested myself, long before submitting the work to a few publishers of my choosing. After some inquiries, I was lucky that my friend and former colleague Ana Jaleco was available. It was four long months of hard work on both sides. I learned that the easy part of writing a book is writing it.

Maybe I’m exaggerating. What I actually learned is that having someone review what we write demands constant humility. It would have been easy — for me, at least — to adopt a defensive posture, to let critical thinking emerge in reaction to the outside perspectives coming my way. Exercising humility meant, instead, directing that energy and attention toward myself. Here’s a hypothesis: humility is directing one’s critical sense toward oneself.

Still, for the work to be done well, you can’t lean too far either way. Criticising only what comes from outside is arrogance. Criticising only what comes from within is lack of confidence and self-pity. I also learned that I should fight for my ideas and formulations as hard as I should accept the proposals to do things differently. But I couldn’t aim for a balance of forces, because that outcome would produce only stalemate. I mean both the internal forces I described — arrogance and victimisation — and the tensions caused by proposals for improvement. I’m sure Ana had to resolve equivalent conflicts. I know this by the care with which she presented her proposals. That care helped my own labour of conscious acceptance or rejection, trying to be conscientious.

All of this happened in a way that was almost entirely asynchronous, which in itself carried the potential for misunderstanding, I think, through the space-time distance that amplifies exaggerated interpretations and other kinds of bias. I can, however, argue the opposite: that having happened asynchronously may have made all these back-and-forths easier — decisions about what to keep and what to change; the acceptance of gross errors, identified without judgement.

Meanwhile, the manuscript has come back from another round of revision, this time at the editor’s request. It was much faster and easier work, because the bulk had already been done. I don’t mean only the work of revision but also of acceptance, of questioning, of refining technique and, above all, taste. The greater speed and ease didn’t diminish the importance of this new pass — nearly every comment, correction, and addition served to improve the book further. One last round of work with the editor still remains. And I can’t wait to learn more.

I realise I still haven’t addressed what led me to open this file and write. Today, Saturday, 25 April, marks three weeks since I last wrote and published here. That the day I write about the desire for creative freedom should coincide with the anniversary of Portugal’s 1974 revolution — which ended a dictatorship and its censorship, among other things — I note here in passing, without pursuing it further. Over the past few days, at least five people wrote to me asking whether I was going to publish this Saturday, or whether I was okay, noticing the absence — from Australia to close by here in Lisbon, from friends to correspondents I’ve never met. Beyond the replies I sent each person, I thought those messages might be a good pretext for writing. I’ve done something similar before, but only because I’d forgotten to publish. Now the reason remains simple: I haven’t published because I haven’t written. Now, knowing why I haven’t written is more complicated, and writing about it means, necessarily, having to discover why.

There’s a first layer of explanation that’s simple. I’ve been busier than I’d like. But the mere idea of having to enumerate what I’ve been doing sounds to me like justification, on top of the unproductive tedium of repeating it all. Occupation has more than one dimension, just like time. It doesn’t have only a technical measurement — through calendars and clocks — but requires an ontological dimension added to it. I’d need much more time and text to explain this properly, and I’m making the conscious choice here not to: to avoid the self-pitying tone and not force an intimacy that would interest neither me nor my readers.

This brake, which I don’t feel in my fingers but which makes them heavier and lazier, has a hypothetical reason. Let me explain. A few weeks ago I took part in a workshop with one of my favourite Portuguese writers — if not my favourite: Gonçalo M. Tavares. It was long and rich, but the mark it left in me had nothing to do with content or form. The mark was already there; the experience uncovered it. I remember thinking (and feeling), as soon as I left Livraria Snob — a bookshop a five-minute walk from my home: “I’d love to have time to think about these things, in this way.” And the short walk home was spent in absolute silence, not because I was alone but because I was clearly aware of being left with a complete emptiness of ideas. An emptiness that contrasted with a very strong feeling.

Since then, I’ve written and published a few pieces. But I’ve been struggling to find topics that excite me enough to write. I’ve wondered whether this is because, in the meantime, I received the good news with which I opened this piece — a kind of creative depletion after delivering a work. Though I felt it, I don’t think that’s the reason. Perhaps whoever reads me has already suspected what I think is happening. The second layer, after the busyness that makes up the first, has to do with a lack of enthusiasm — with feeling writing as a burden. Curious that the first thing I wrote on this page was the title.

This weight appears by contrast. Just as a poor man envies the possessions of a rich one, I envied the possibility of thinking about certain things in a certain way. All this without knowing anything about the idolised writer’s life, assuming that such form and such content are only possible with time I don’t have. Time I find neither in the calendar nor in the clock, and which therefore cannot be reclaimed by any cunning productivity strategy. Because that’s it — productivity and its imperative — that kills the time I miss.2

  1. I first mentioned this project in a note on not writing year-end pieces ↩︎
  2. On the difference between measured time and lived time, and how productivity’s imperative colonises the latter, I’ve written at greater length in The Right to Temporal Dignity and For a new definition of “work”. ↩︎
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