"The desire to write grows with writing"
About this Quote
Erasmus is smuggling a psychological truth into a line that sounds almost like a proverb: writing isn’t powered by a stable reservoir of “inspiration,” it’s powered by momentum. The sentence is built like a little engine. “Desire” suggests something inward and volatile, but Erasmus tethers it to a very plain mechanism: practice. Not reading, not talking about writing, not waiting for the right mood - writing. The form mirrors the message: a loop where the action feeds the appetite.
The subtext is quietly polemical. In Erasmus’s humanist world, learning was being wrestled out of cloisters and scholastic hair-splitting into a culture of letters - correspondence, essays, translations, public argument. Saying the urge grows with the act is a rebuke to both the timid student and the pious moralist who treats composition as vanity. It’s also a strategy for self-governance: if you can’t command your feelings, you can at least command your habits, and your feelings may follow.
Context matters: Erasmus lived inside an early print ecosystem that was suddenly hungry for text and quick to amplify it. Writing more didn’t just make you better; it made you visible, legible, employable. “Desire” here isn’t purely romantic; it’s also ambition, discipline, and the pleasure of joining a republic of letters. The line works because it demystifies creativity without flattening it: the spark is real, but it’s manufactured by friction.
The subtext is quietly polemical. In Erasmus’s humanist world, learning was being wrestled out of cloisters and scholastic hair-splitting into a culture of letters - correspondence, essays, translations, public argument. Saying the urge grows with the act is a rebuke to both the timid student and the pious moralist who treats composition as vanity. It’s also a strategy for self-governance: if you can’t command your feelings, you can at least command your habits, and your feelings may follow.
Context matters: Erasmus lived inside an early print ecosystem that was suddenly hungry for text and quick to amplify it. Writing more didn’t just make you better; it made you visible, legible, employable. “Desire” here isn’t purely romantic; it’s also ambition, discipline, and the pleasure of joining a republic of letters. The line works because it demystifies creativity without flattening it: the spark is real, but it’s manufactured by friction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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