Only Connect: WTF?
In which I try to explain WTF I'm doing here: a lot of words, a few laughs (maybe? no promises), and connecting prose with passion.
I have a friend who is a writer. Like, an actual writer, one who has written books that publishers have published and national newspapers have reviewed and people have purchased with real American dollars. Probably other currencies too. I met this friend on Twitter, and our origin story is basically words and how much we both love them. As long as I have known her, she has nagged me to write things other than tweets, and I have always resisted her efforts because I am at heart a recalcitrant toddler and also because writing things other than tweets would be terrifying and hard.
She was at it again the last time we had brunch. “I can’t just stop everything and, you know, be a writer,” I said petulantly, stabbing at the organic eggs on my plate.
“No one can,” she said, sipping her tea. “Do it anyway.”
There has always been a lot of debate in Literary Circles about what E.M. Forster meant by “Only Connect,” which is the epigram to Howards End. The book, described by the famously self-deprecating Forster as “approaching a good novel,” is about how comically, tragically bad most people are at forging authentic connections with other people. Within the novel itself, “only connect” pops out mostly in the internal monologues of Margaret Schlegel, who is a bit of a drama queen but who is also very earnest in her determination to overcome the obstacles to meaningful human connection:
“Only connect! That was her whole sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” —Howards End, chapter 22
“Only connect” is the bucket into which readers and literary critics have poured oceans of analysis in the years since Howards End was published in 1910. It’s Forster’s celebration of the persistence and insistence of love or his despair at the insurmountable barriers of class and gender or his directive to connect one’s head with one’s heart or a commentary on the difficulty of connecting our conventional personalities with our transgressive desires or—
Whatever. The interpretation of “only connect” that resonates the most with me at this particular moment in time—approximately 7:06 a.m. on a random weekday in the year of our lord 2023—has to do with technology. This is ironic because Forster himself was something of a technophobe; he feared that the technology of his time (airplanes, automobiles, the telephone) would fuck up true human connection even more than humans usually manage to fuck it up on their own. “Science . . . is enslaving [man] to machines,” he wrote in his journal in 1908, and if the extent to which all our eyeballs are currently superglued to our devices is any indication, he was 100% right.
But he was also 100% wrong. Technology, especially social media, has connected humans in ways Forster never could have dreamed of, or if he did he would have woken up screaming. There are approximately one billion thinkpieces about the impact of social media on human connection and I’m not interested in adding to that collection here. But my definition of “only connect” is largely informed, these days, by the Musk-scented meltdown of Twitter, which for many years was the place where I did my writing, such as it was. Unlike most other social media platforms, Twitter lives and dies by the word: goofy memes and dog videos aside, it’s primarily a place where people write things and other people read them and react to them in word and sometimes in deed. The fact that a lot of people are trying to destroy that tells you a lot about the power of words.
The intensity of my grief and rage at the loss of pre-Musk Twitter took me by surprise until I realized what I was really grieving: words, and the way the world vibrates when you send them out into it. The connection of the prose and the passion.
One of the things I appreciate most about my writer friend is that she has never once said to me “you should write because you are a good writer” or “you should write because other people will appreciate your writing” because she’s not a liar and both of those things would be lies. I mean, they might be true occasionally, but the lie is in the should, that a person should write for any other reason than “if I don’t write this down somewhere, my head will explode.”
So that’s what’s happening here, I guess: I’m trying to keep my head from exploding, and right now it feels like one way to do that is to write things down here and send them out into the world. I’m really glad—and a little terrified—that you’re coming along for the ride.
Staying disconnected from *should* is (speaking for myself) 'way too much of the effort I put into writing. AND, it's worth every bit of the un-shoulding effort to be able to absorb myself in connecting up words in order to keep my head from exploding. Thank you for the connections you're sharing here.
You must keep writing. For yourself, and the rest of us. I know for a fact your friend agrees.