What’s with this six hundred words, a friend asks. Gimmick, branding, fetish? Why not five hundred or six-hundred-and-twelve? Isn’t my insistence a tad draconian, procrustean, obsessive?
Fair question, to which I don’t really know the answer. I stumbled on this length a decade and nearly four thousand missives ago. It felt Goldilocks right – neither too long nor too short, too difficult nor too diffident: at a reading time of three to five minutes more a snack than a meal. Readers would know what they were getting and I what I was making. An exact count became my private game, like hitting a bullseye. Word-processors make tallying easy.
Creature consciousness craves predictability. We find a way that works and stick to it. Birds of a feather sing their songs identically. Parents of all species teach imitation. Dog Henry knows Jane’s and my patterns better than we. Humans, though we may malign routines as ruts, hanker for the tried and true. That worn-out adjective “traditional” warms our hearts.
Predictability alleviates anxiety and permits a delusion of control. Every art form with its rules started as an innovation that caught on. Why must a haiku have seventeen syllables or a (Shakespearean) sonnet fourteen lines? Because that’s how it’s done. Anybody who makes a sonnet is both doffing their cap and inviting comparison with predecessors.
Montaigne invented the essay. He didn’t mean to: he was bored and lonely in his chateau and this was a way to conjure company. Write to an absent friend and voila the friend materializes, like the genie from Aladdin’s lamp. You are here with me now in this we hour. Thanks for coming.
Six hundred words is more a howdy than a pronouncement, more suggestion than prescription. Our limited time together encourages sprightliness and concision. I mean to brighten your day, even when our topic is grim. Misery likes company, said Mephistopheles to Dr. Faust.
The brevity of our outings suits my addled intellect. I could never be a lawyer or philosopher proving my contentions step by step. The very notion of proving is a pipe dream, to my way of thinking. I once fancied “Yes, but…” for an epitaph.
My six-hundred-word limit slily flatters you, which makes you like me more. I know your time is precious and this allotment of minutes an immeasurable gift. Windy bores infuriate by implying our comparative unimportance. I spy you reading as a chef watches diners sip his soup.
Sometimes six hundred words are inadequate to my subject – in my shout-outs to Montaigne or Spinoza, say. This forces me to slice my thoughts into six-hundred-word chunks, which imposes cohesion. Rarely are six-hundred words too many for my matter (though Jane sometimes chides me with “throat-clearing”).
In an oft-cited essay the philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished two types of intellects, the hedgehog and the fox. “A fox,” he quotes an old Greek, “knows many things but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” I muster with the foxes. I distrust big ideas that organize experience into a comprehensible scheme. The only thing I know is I don’t know much and whatever I thought I knew is likely wrong. Each six-hundred-word missive is a foray into my ignorance. I write not to inform but to find out.
In school we’re taught how to write an essay. A tidy essay has five parts, quoth Google: “the introduction, writer's arguments, counter arguments, refutation, and conclusion.” This is hooey. An essay is a stroll with a pal in the garden of ideas, noticing this and that, not knowing where you’ll end up. Six hundred words is my clock.