Writing is how I do philosophy. I went …

Writing is how I do philosophy.

I went into Waterstones on Gower st in London intending to find a book about writing. The shop itself was superb—the kind of place a bookshop should be—and I wandered through the writing shelves waiting for something to reach out and demand a place in my collection. A few books caught my eye, but nothing held me.

Eventually I made my way upstairs and found the philosophy section. The change in me was immediate. Suddenly I was excited. I wanted to pull books from the shelves, turn them over, take them home. I was like a kid in a candy store. Without formulating a thought, I could feel it in my body: this is my section; this is my game. I could spend hours here, lost in thought and discovery.

That recognition caught me slightly off guard because I think of myself first as a writer. But perhaps writing was never the subject. It is the instrument I use to examine a life, test an idea, follow a contradiction and discover what I think. Philosophy is the field. Writing is the method. Life is the material.

The book I carried away was Andrew Hui’s A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, which feels like the bridge I had unknowingly gone looking for. The aphorism is philosophy conducted through the sentence: thought compressed into a small verbal object and released to travel between minds. It sits close to the fragment, the field note, the social post and the charged line caught during a walk.

Upstairs, among the philosophers, I felt at home.