On writing and the importance of knowing when the flowers bloom (series: notes to myself)

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Once upon a time, in Rome, during one of those pretentious, boring, self-aggrandising dinners (salotto) among “intellectuals” competing to show who had read, or watched, or listened, or met, or visited more and better this or that, I was quietly trying to keep inside my own mind when I was asked, rather abruptly, by a famous Italian writer, why I did not write myself. 

He knew me as a philosopher. 

I replied, trying to be nice but coming out as abrasive as I did not mean and yet wished, that it was because I had no idea about which flowers bloom when. 

He looked at me a bit puzzled. 

I realised we did not share the same readings, so I told him it was - in my view a very funny (philosophers’ jokes are a joke) - reference to Proust, and his famous description of the student who had failed to write a decent philosophical essay. 

The room went quiet, but luckily the garrulous host, spiritually empty in her soul, as I still had to discover, yet sharply witty in her mind, by which I used to be enchanted, masterly rekindled the conversation on a new topic. And so the evening returned to its sparkling conversation, and I could go back inside the quiet space of my mind, now slowly considering that indeed it would be really nice to know when flowers bloom. 

Ref. Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, The Philosophy Class, "And don’t mix up the scent of the lilac with the scent of the heliotrope. You must know that one catches the fresh smell of the lilac only after rain, whereas the heliotrope does not give the fullness of its scent— which is very subtle— except when the sun is on it."

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