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One of the more curious denouncements to appear in Friedrich Nietzsche’s supremely truculent Twilight of the Idols (1888) is a brief but furious attack on the writing habits of Gustave Flaubert. In a letter to Guy de Maupassant, his protégé, Flaubert had made the seemingly innocuous statement: “One cannot think and write except when seated.” The author of Madame Bovary(1856) had always been a sedentary sort and had previously informed Maupassant that “a civilized person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim.” However, to Nietzsche’s ear, finely attuned to the slightest signs of cultural decadence, Flaubert’s admission was nothing less than an attack on the nature of creativity itself. “There I have caught you, nihilist!” he snapped triumphantly. “The sedentary life (das sitzfleisch—literally “sitting meat”) is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value.”

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Bear walking thru the filed in India Photo: Getty images

Ever since Nietzsche’s declaration, there has been some disagreement among writers, thinkers, doctors, and designers as to whether inspiration and creativity come from being seated and quiescent, or from being upright and vigorous. (Full disclosure: This article is being written standing up.) It was the early twentieth century labor journalist and suffragette, Mary Heaton Vorse, who pithily described the art of writing as “the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Vorse was expressing a distinctly Flaubertian sentiment that was all the

more radical when one considers how few women wore pants at the time. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast, proved to be a strict Nietzschean, declaring that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up,” which he did by perching his typewriter on a chest-high shelf, while his desk became obscured by books.

Yet trying to find out whether authors who share similar writing positions also share similar writing styles is by no means easy. Such disparate authors as Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, and Fernando Pessoa all wrote standing up, while Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, and Truman Capote took the Flaubertian creed to its ultimate extent by writing while lying down. Indeed, Capote went so far as to declare himself “a completely horizontal writer.”

We can conjecture that it was physical considerations that caused the six-foot-six-inch Thomas Wolfe to write his opulent, autobiographical novels using the top of the refrigerator as his desk, the shifting of his weight from foot to foot being a neat approximation of the Nietzschean decree that all writing should “dance.” But what do we then make of Roald Dahl, also six-foot-six, who everyday climbed into a sleeping bag before settling into an old wing-backed chair, his feet resting immobile on a battered traveling case full of logs? Dahl’s claim that “all the best stuff comes at the desk,” is a simple modern variation on Flaubert’s static dictum.