Free Unless It Moves the Human Heart by Roger Rosenblatt

will the reader.” My thumbs go up again.
    “Whatever the subject, we always seem to come around to denigrating journalism,” says Nina. “That is, you do.”
    “I know. And I’d be ashamed of myself if I were capable of human feelings. And in fact I admire lots of journalists. But what they do is not what writers do. As you have already discovered, there’s a mystery to the act of writing. You write, yet you don’t always understand what you’ve written. And you’re not always understood. And you’re never fully understood. And this is a good thing—dwelling in and creating mysteries. But in a column, or an editorial, or a news article, you must be understood, clearly and completely. Your words convey a subject. They are about something. In real writing the words drift away from the subject. Journalism is communication. It delivers information, even in the form of ideas. If you only do that, you’re not writing.”
    “But don’t you think writers need to be in touch with the world?” asks Robert.
    I tell him I do think so, but that writers have their own way of being in touch. When Richard Wright wrote Native Son , he was certainly in touch with the world of racism, but what gives the book its lasting power is that it is a work of art, and not a polemic. The fact that Bigger Thomas semi-accidentally suffocates the Dalton girl makes him a target for all the categorical hatreds of the time. But when he murders his girlfriend and throws her down a shaft, he becomes a willing killer, and thus oddly more human. James Baldwin took Wright to task for his later books that were nakedly political, because they were too much in touch with the times, and they surrendered to them. The healthiest relationship between a writer and his world is a vague one, not tethered to specific incidents or specific causes, but rather one that uses those specifics to disclose an abstract truth. Pure thought is contaminated by the news, and by history, too. The real writer uses history only as a moral reminder. He is in touch with the world in his heart. And the world of events is of no greater or lesser inspiration to him than the wings of a katydid.
    “Look at the opening of Jasmine’s essay. It contains the world, but also so much more.” Jasmine reads her first paragraph aloud for us:
    As I sit in my modern English and Irish drama course, I discuss, in a detached manner, my paper topic—the importance of myth and metaphor in Yeats’s plays Cathleen ni Houlihan and On Baile’s Strand , and in Synge’s Riders to the Sea. A topic my professor says is too broad and would be more specific if I focused on the importance of the sea; fertile ground, if I decide to make it my master’s thesis. In a hushed way, I mention that I have already begun my master’s thesis, although not to the extent I should have. She asks me what my thesis is, and I explain it is on Adinkra symbols. “Where are they from?” she asks. “Ghana,” I answer. She muses a bit about how she’s never heard of the topic. I bemoan the work that will have to go into it, considering I have hardly started and it’s due in May. “You’ll have to go to Ghana.” She laughs, and as if I had not remembered myself, I say that I have, and that is where I got the idea.
    “That’s really great,” says Suzanne. “It gives everything about her, including attitude.”
    “It’s such a delicate piece of writing,” says Ana. “So clean and quiet. I love this essay.”
    “Okay,” says George. “So what is an essay? We’ve still not defined the thing itself.”
    “The word comes from France,” says Veronique. “As all good things do.” She puts on a French smirk. “ Essayer —to try.”
    “Very good, Veronique. An essay is an attempt. What’s that all about? Poems, plays, novels, do something, accomplish something. But an essay only tries ?” They are quiet.
    “Maybe the trying in an essay is what the writer wants to do,” says Sven. “He wants to show