ESSAY #2#

Have you ever really tried to stop and think about how much your mind processes on a daily basis? It's impossible to do, even if you remembered everything you did today. That leaves out about 6209.12 other days full of thoughts, sights, sounds, and dreams you have still forgotten. The mind works at an insanely high speed 24/7, no matter what you're doing. As David Foster Wallace put it in his 2001 story "Good Old Neon": "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." If you've ever felt scatterbrained or confused, you probably can understand this well. Everyone has at least felt like this once. Thoughts like these have been written and recorded many times, but one in particular is the collection of Montaigne's essays. In a stream-of-consciousness styled rant of words and sentences, Montaigne discusses every topic that can come to his mind. Sometimes these would conflict and revise each other, and sometimes his thoughts would all come together just as if he'd had it all planned out from the start. On the opposite side of the spectrum, authors like Jane Austen, author of Pride and Prejudice, has a clear and straightforward thought process to tell a complicated story. Using foreshadowing in an essay where you haven't even begun to think of the ending would not be very easy, but for someone with a mind like Austen, having a character like Darcy seem distant at the beginning and end up being the main love interest of Elizabeth is a clever and well thought out idea to include. Montaigne's techniques of writing may coincide with Foster's quote about the mind, but compared to a precise writer like Austen, their works seem like an ADHD nightmare.
The stream-of-consciousness thought process is not by any means an underground or new term. For thousands of years, people have just began to write what flows out of them. As our minds change and we teach ourselves more about what we write, these thoughts change. Montaigne's essays show this change at a time as early as the Renaissance , and with many different topics. In one of the essays, "Of Repentance", he even says himself that he may contradict himself, but he will not contradict the truth. His mind changes rapidly over the course of the essay, and may even make false his opinion from the beginning, or go off into a whole different tangent. David Foster Wallace had a similar mind, in the sense that he also wrote as the thoughts came to his mind. In comparison to Austen, it really comes down to how each person's brain works. Austen's brain works in a way that she can think of a plot and have it come together over a length of time, keep a solid theme going and have reoccurring characters. It's merely two sides of the same spectrum.

The narrow minded brain, such as Austen's, can think up a story and have everything come together neatly wrapped in a bow.  This presents a clear and understandable plot enjoyable for everyone, even enough to get a movie made about it, and can be seen as a solid and completed work of art. This also relates to a lot of pop, electronic, and alternative music. It has chord progressions that continue and expand throughout the song, but lead up to the end and have a main focal point to them. The wider, more expanded and scattered brain does not think like that. It can go on without keeping a similar theme, ranging from one topic to another, moving at 3000 miles per hour. While seeming to be more abstract, less neat and not as good at first, it can prove to be a very intriguing and thought-provoking style of writing. Some of these types of thought resonate with classic experimental rock/post-punk, hip-hop, and experimental music. Whichever writing style, whether it be Montaigne's or Austen's, can suit it's purpose and tell it's story. In the end, it's all about how your mind can follow it's path, whether it's completing an essay about Montaigne's essays versus Austen's novel, or going on a tangent about music and delving from the topic at hand.