Are novelists better at psychology?

Yes. 🧠 Find out why they're better at psych than psychologists.

Ideas are intangible,
The easiest of all to change;
One merely has to wave their hand 
And brush the cloud of smoke away.
The world appears immutable:
Is it not made of rock?

But actually ideas remain
While all the world around them alters 
A man grows old, decays
His hair grows grey, his nails long,
His beard white, his pate goes bald 
 / meets his maker 
The only thing unchanged: his mind 

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The explanation for the above follows. It’s a bit fragmented—I’m sorry, it’s Monday evening after a long workday, 14 hours before this is meant to go out. Accordingly, I’ve numbered points on little sections; think of them as aphorisms on the above poem. The lesson at the end is more coherent. 

Explanation

1.

In this poem I talk about how ideas seem like nothing, and the physical body feels like the realest thing, while actually a person is more likely to die than change their mind. The body decays faster than one’s humblest opinion.

In the first stanza, an idea is compared to a “cloud of smoke” that one can “brush away.” In the second stanza there is a reversal where, the poet explains, “ideas remain” while various body parts decompose and the holder of the idea dies.

2.

I believe that Rousseau argues something like I’m arguing—that anything will change before a person’s mind—in the The Social Contract, but I might be misremembering. Let me know in the comments. 

Moreover, I don’t remember the context of this poem’s writing. It has been months since I looked at it. I left it in its crude form because I thought it seemed so interesting at the end: I didn’t remember making the choices but, when I returned, found that I liked them. 

The “ /”—space and a slash—are not something I usually do, nor are the “:” before, and no period after, the final clause of the poem.

What I do remember is “pate”—a word I used in one of my earliest poems. I clung to what I perceived as the peerlessness of that poem for so long that I refused to lift the word from it for another poem.

3.

I guess you could call this poem, with its treatment of the mind as unknown territory, “anti-materialist.” That is, I’m arguing that people don’t pay enough attention to the mind, and rather too much to the body (a position which, I know, will not appeal to all my philosophical readers).

Nevertheless, I think that the health of the mind is just beginning to be unlocked, and we need simple, lucid, passionate public discourse about investigations into the modern mind. 

And this is one such study: I am of the opinion that people hold their opinions too tightly for too long. The argument is poetic, I suppose. By that I mean, you feel the obvious pull of the argument by the aesthetic appeal it has in the poem. It’s like the halo effect: its beauty makes it appear true. 

That’s, I mean, if you find the poem beautiful. Smash that like button to let me know.

4.

Once we study a part of the body, we begin to unlock its power, like how understanding the patterns of the stomach can lead to a healthier gut. As much with the brain, whose opinions sometimes clutch it like a pitbull to a leg, cutting off the bloodflow.   

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Hey, thanks for reading last week’s newsletter by Monroe Lawrence. If you missed it, here’s the archive link:

Monroe Lawrence discusses a poem from his book.

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Lesson

Literature is the study of psychology just as much as psychology is. That is why great psychologists are often great writers (Freud) or have great novelists as siblings (William and Henry James). Few writers are as good at the opposite skill (writing or psychology) as are Freud and the novelist James. 

You should read the ones who decidedly are; the tested books. All the obvious choices like George Eliot, Tony Morrison, Vigdis Hjorth, Olga Tokarczuk, and Rachel Cusk. Read those and you’re in good hands for novels that really get to the bottom of psychology. That’s how Rachel Cusk would do it, by the way. 

After all, it is natural for language to eloquently capture psychology. Language is how the mind expresses itself. Language is like music or mathematics, but with the added dimension of meaning something.

And novelists are writing all the time. It isn’t because writers sit in cafes, watching people, or have especially intelligent conversations that they become great psychologists. It’s because when you write all day, you inevitably begin writing about psychology.

I encourage you to read fiction if you want to explore the mind while being entertained.

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Scansion

This is mostly a joke but I think you can read the rhyme scheme, if you are Gates Foundation-tier charitable with the slant rhymes, as this:

abcbad bebffeg

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Featured image copyright Torben Robertson 2022.