How to write an opinion column

I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure out how to write an opinion column.

Should a column be a personal endeavor in which the column and the columnist are inseparable, mutually reflecting one another? If so, at what point does an endearing expression of oneself spill over into maudlin and gaudy self-indulgence? On the other hand, is column-writing an academic endeavor? With an academic community as an audience, does the columnist have an obligation to forgo trivialities and engage in serious intellectual discourse? If so, at what point does earnest erudition devolve into pedantic grandiloquence? Perhaps right now, in this column.
Each time I read another brilliant column on these pages, I find myself asking and re-asking myself these questions. Each of my fellow columnists has a distinctive and enviable style. This diversity of styles of column-writing, perhaps a natural consequence of the diversity of personalities and interests that the opinion page deliberately selects, means that I have, at different points, arrived at contradictory answers to the above questions. An affably personal style works just as well for one person as a detached scholarly approach works for another. Which leaves me where in answering how I want to write my column?

One approach is just to write. To think about writing is perhaps to over-think it. If the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi can teach us something about the opinion page, perhaps that is it. Zhuangzi’s fish trap or rabbit snare metaphor, often cited as representative of the Daoist perspective on language, speaks to this question: “The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.” If words have no importance in and of themselves, if my column itself has no worth, if it’s just a means to an end, then does it matter how I write my column so long as you understand what I’m saying?
But then perhaps Zhuangzi wouldn’t even approve of an opinion page in the first place. In a passage from his eponymous work that he attributes—or pseudo-attributes—to Confucius, Zhaungzi quotes an apparently established aphorism from his time: “Transmit the established facts; Do not transmit words of exaggeration.” Although Zhuangzi was a Daoist, not a Confucian, scholars claim that Zhuangzi paradoxically seeks to speak through Confucius’s voice in this passage. But that’s a separate discussion. More to the point, is all this column-writing nonsense, then, just exaggerated buffoonery?

At least that’s what my column title suggests. “The way that can be told,” of course, is only the first half of the first line of the Dao De Jing—the remainder reads, “is not The Way,” or something similar, depending on the translation. A column is, by nature, vainglorious—anyone who alludes to Daoist thought in his Spectator column title, let alone someone who writes about column-writing in his column, has got to be particularly self-indulgent. It’s like Dante in the first rung of hell, humbly asserting himself as “the sixth among such intellects” as Homer and Ovid. Except it’s not like that at all. In any case, would Zhuangzi consider all of this a waste of time?

Standing in direct opposition to Zhuangzi is the Confucian philosopher Xunzi. Believing that human nature is essentially evil, Xunzi argues that the exacting observance of rites is the prime way to overcome our innate proclivity to do evil. Language is one such rite. In the chapter “Rectifying Names,” which is a central concept that recurs throughout Confucian thought, Xunzi says, “He who can use names in such a way that they are both practical and esthetically pleasing may be said to have a real understanding of them.” To him, then, words are not merely rabbit snares. They must be chosen deliberately and carefully. If I am correctly reading Xunzi, then, and if I can appropriate him for use in my column, I can’t just write. The purpose of a column cannot just be the communication of meaning. There is another purpose, at once more transcendent and more fundamental. That’s pretty daunting.

But all this leaves me nowhere. I have meandered from style to style, approach to approach, method to method in my mental column-writing process, and while I wish I could close this entry with some sort of consummation to my quest for a column Way, that still hasn’t come.

It’s a problem that calls into question what column-writing, or even writing in general, is—or at least what it should be. We take it for granted that works of creative literature should have some sort of artistic merit, but we don’t really expect that in a newspaper or on the opinion page. Is that the way it should be? Is that for good reason? I don’t know.

Amin Ghadimi is a Columbia College sophomore. He is the former Spectator editorial page editor. He is also a senior editor of the Columbia East Asia Review and the secretary of the Bahá’í Club of Columbia University. The Way That Can Be Told runs alternate Mondays.