This sculpture, which I pass while running along the Hudson, reminds me of an idea.
HOBOKEN, OCTOBER 27, 2026. On a sunny October morning, I run along the Hudson to Pier C and flop, exhausted, on a bench facing the river. I gaze across the glittering waves at Manhattan, sun hovering over the skyscrapers, those embodiments of human yearning, and think, Okay, time for an idea.
Wait! That’s what I should write about! Ideas! My compulsion to come up with ideas, package them into words, send them into the world. No one’s paying me to do this anymore, so why keep doing it? Where did this odd habit come from? And what are ideas, anyway? Why do they matter to me?
Still sitting on Pier C I think, Ideas, Ideas, Ideas. I want to imprint this fabulous, loopy meta-idea on my brain, so I remember it when I get back to my apartment.
Sometimes, by the time I’m home, an idea that comes to me on a run no longer seems fabulous. It seems dumb, not worth writing down. In this case, my enthusiasm persists. Still in my sweaty shirt and shorts, I grab a pen, flip my notebook open and scribble ideas about ideas. Like:
“Idea” is a baggy term, which accommodates notions, suppositions, conjectures, claims, analogies, speculations, arguments, reactions, rebuttals, metaphors, doubts, denials, jokes yada yada. Rather than, What’s an idea? better ask, What isn’t?
An idea can be grand or humble, ironic or deadly earnest. It can begin as a mere thought or feeling and evolve into a statement or question or anything in between.
When an idea surfaces in my head, I might think, Nah, no good, and let it sink back into the muck whence it came. Or I think, This might work. Because ideas spawn more ideas, a bad idea might mutate into a better one. By “better” I mean something I can express to my satisfaction.
I will ideas into existence now, I actively search for ideas to convey in books or columns. But ideas, whether or not I want them, have popped into my head since I was a kid. Examples: Death makes life meaningless. War is stupid. Life is strange. If God exists, there’s something wrong with God. These old ideas still nag me.
As an adult I monetized this mental tik, made a career out of it. I became a machine that turns ideas into articles, blog posts, books. My ideas have sources as disparate as an editor’s command, a student’s paper, waves on the Hudson. These are proximate causes.
The ultimate cause of my ideas is my life-long uneasiness, my sense that something’s wrong with me, or the world, or both. My ideas are responses to this uneasiness, attempts to resolve or at least relieve it. My efforts invariably fall short, necessitating new ideas.
A sense of not-rightness pervades the work of major writers. Novelists like Melville, James, Wallace, Pynchon, Woolf. Poets like Dickinson, Eliot, Williams. (Williams decreed “no ideas but in things,” I prefer “no ideas but in people.”)
Not to mention philosophers. I make students in my first-year humanities courses read “Theory as Liberatory Practice” by feminist theorist bell hooks. hooks came to “theory”—which is roughly synonymous with “ideas”—as a child because she was “hurting” and appalled by life’s unfairness.
I’m a straight white guy, not a black, “queer” (her term) female like hooks. But I nod along when hooks says she was “desperate to grasp what was happening around and within me.” The world freaks you out, so you seek solutions, ideas for making things better or at least less bewildering.
Coming up with ideas, putting them into words, debating them with other people who have their own ideas—all this is more than a job. Writing lends my life meaning, it gives me pleasure, even when my subject is as grim as depression, cancer, the mass-murder of children.
This positive feedback keeps me going when my ideas are met with hostility or indifference. I also keep writing because the pleasure of publishing never lasts. My best ideas--meaning those I express to my satisfaction—make me feel good only temporarily. Unease returns like the tide.
What if I come up with an idea so powerful it dispels my uneasiness once and for all? Is that even possible? Does such an idea exist?
Well, maybe. In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James quotes a philosopher, Xenos Clark, who has an epiphany under the influence of ether. Clark emerges from his anesthetic stupor convinced that philosophy is “like a hound hunting his own tail” and that philosophy’s work is done “when we cease our intellectual questioning.”
I have a clue what Clark means. In 2018, during a silent Buddhist retreat, I realized that when you seek enlightenment, you’re looking for something you already have. You are, in effect, searching for your own eyeballs. They’re in your head, dummy!
This realization, this big idea, pleased me. I felt smug. Then other ideas jostled my big idea, battered it, knocked it askew, especially this idea, or meta-idea, to which I’m pretty committed:
If you think you’ve found an idea or theory of everything or whatever that solves the mystery, you’re not enlightened, you’re deluded. If you cease your intellectual questioning, you’re not wise, you’re oblivious. You haven’t won the game, you’ve just given up.
Okay, that’s enough ideas about ideas for now. Time to wrap this column up and toss it into the world. I’ll feel fine a while, especially if readers respond with ideas of their own.
But inevitably, the thrill of launching an idea fades, uneasiness rises. I go for a run, hoping to find another idea I can turn into words like these.
Further Reading:
For more ideas, see my list of past “Cross-Check” columns or my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment. Or any of my other books.