Charles Bukowski described writing as photography:
“In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.”
Everyone wants depth. Context. Quick fixes. Someone to tell them what’s what.
I just want to breathe and feel.
Less of a manic approach to details than a photographic approach to capturing moments and expressing feeling and faith.
In a word: Truth.
That’s what words do. It’s not meant to give all known information. Any machine can do that.
We try so hard to develop overly-engineered ideas. Structure over style. Philosophies that go nowhere fast.
I want to give you a moment in time. Bite-sized nuggets of my world created as an experience you can identify with.
They say actions speak louder than words. But stories speak louder than checklists and details.
Capturing moments is philosophy. In the absolute truest sense.
It is the most natural thing you can do. The most relatable as well.
The greatest mental frameworks for understanding the world are handed down to us through great literature and stories.
What Stories Really Tell Us
What makes literature great? Being able to identify with it and connect to it. Just as in life.
If you can apply words to your life whether fictional or not, then that is philosophy in the truest sense. Implicit rather than explicit.
The ability to understand moments does not need to be communicated in elaborate detail.
Artists do it every day with paint and a brush. Entire movements sparked with a single canvas.
No one needed to write down elaborate explanations about the ideas driving those great works.
Van Gogh’s Starry Night elicits emotion before you understand the mechanics or what it represents.
In many ways, we knew the truth before it was even told to us.
The Apostle Paul understood this. He said so:
“But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.”
He knew what we don’t. Faith and feeling beat facts and figures. That’s why he dedicated his life to the greatest story ever told.
Not because they needed to describe every meaning in the life of Jesus Christ. But because Jesus Christ’s life gave us all meaning in a single story.
Capturing moments beats describing in detail every single time.
