Midwinter is for hibernation and the chance to make different kinds of connections<\/p>\n
\u201cDisconnect from the internet for at least two hours a day and treat your own thoughts like a garden through which you are strolling,\u201d was the advice offered by the novelist Ian McEwan <\/a>to younger writers after being made a Companion of Honour in December. The capacity to be curious about mental processes \u2013 while simultaneously experiencing them \u2013 is an important one for an author seeking to describe the human condition. But anyone who values self-awareness will be used to noticing how their mind works and wondering why.<\/p>\n \u201cOnly connect<\/a>\u201d was the maxim of another famous novelist, EM Forster. Forster used the characters in his novels to put flesh on his arguments against the emotionally repressive code of the time. But McEwan\u2019s recommendation to disconnect should not be understood as a repudiation of Forster\u2019s humanism. He was not warning writers off paying attention to other people\u2019s minds and ideas \u2013 but drawing attention to the need to spend time with our own. In a world of permanent connection, in which attention has been commodified, switching off and away from the outside world is arguably harder than ever before.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Midwinter is for hibernation and the chance to make different kinds of connections \u201cDisconnect from the internet for at least two hours a day and treat your own thoughts like a garden through which you are strolling,\u201d was the advice offered by the novelist Ian McEwan to younger writers after being made a Companion of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}