learning journal 4: thoughts on babbie

I had to employ a bit of extra-creative critical thinking as I was relating Babbie's readings to my own project, so I hope I can relate some of that thinking in a clear and concise way. I plan to focus this post on Babbie's section "The Various Roles of the Observer."

In this section, Babbie describes the difference between and a complete participant and a complete observer. A complete participant obviously participates in whatever he or she is observing; a complete observer, though, is more of a fly on the wall. I wondered, because I am going to be studying writers of the classical British essayist, how can I be anything but a complete observer because the men and women I'm going to be researching are all DEAD? Certainly, there are contemporary essayists that write in the tradition of the classical essay, but my studies will be focused on the deceased. But then I realized that studying deceased essayists will only be half of my project: the other half will be to incorporate their writing style into my own writing. So as I write, what will my role be?

The actual act of writing, of course, involves sitting down with pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. But, especially for a nonfiction writer, eventually the writer has to stop reading books and actually getting out and living. Which, for me, means that as I writer I will have to live while I'm in London, and to do that I will have to be more than a complete observer. But the beauty about being an essayist is that it doesn't matter what exactly I do, I will always be able to find topics to write about. As essayist Alexander Smith says,

"The essay-writer has no lack of subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if unsatisfied with that, he has the world’s six thousand years to depasture his gay or serious humour upon."
<---- Alexander Smith


So, according to this, I suppose I could be a complete observer and write essays. But better than this will be an attempt to participate in London life--in experiencing the history of the place, in interacting with people (people in bookstores, people in markets, people on the Tube, people who catch my fancy in any way), in eating the food, in walking across the bridges over the Thames at sunrise or sunset. Being a complete participant, in a way, doesn't necessarily mean that I will have to interview people, but it does mean that I will have to live life in London as Londoners do--and it will be my mission to find out how I will do that.

I think that's it.