“I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.”

Janet Flanner wrote that in a column of hers probably almost a century ago, when she was the French foreign correspondent for The New Yorker. I came across the quote when I was putting together this week’s POV column, which I do every week for the Journal. She was born on March 13, 1892, which put her in the POV running for this March 13th issue, and I almost included a quote of hers, until I found this one, and being a biweekly columnist myself, it spoke to me.

I’d only heard of Flanner before because of an obituary she wrote for Edith Wharton in 1929. Wharton is one of my favorite writers; I’ve done many a school project about her, and Flanner’s piece doesn’t paint her in the best light. I’ve often quoted from it as a counterpoint in my pro-Wharton arguments, particularly one sentence about Wharton being paraded around New York high society on the “precise parabola of a pompous arm.” Love that line.

So, Flanner and I disagree about Edith Wharton, but other than that, she’s the absolute coolest. She wrote her biweekly Letter from Paris under a pen name from 1925 to 1975, covering everything from Pablo Picasso to the Nuremberg trials. She was one of those terribly contemporary pre-war expats hanging out with Ernest Hemingway in Les Deux Magots, chain-smoking and talking about the fate of the world. If I were her, I’d soak it all up too.

I’ve written about this “sponge” attitude before. Some of the first columns I wrote when I moved to New York City were just streams of observations – dirty subway stops, night noise, things I’ve gotten so used to after four years. I admire Flanner most for remaining curious over the course of her enormous career. Fifty years is a long time to be a sponge.

Paradoxically, this is also why I admire Edith Wharton. She was an aristocrat coming from Manhattan’s upper crust, and she wrote so bitingly about the world she knew. Her words drip with knowing, playful mockery, her characters were almost definitely based on the people around her, and they were always getting mad at her for writing things that were just a little too true. What a sponge she was.

Every writing class I’ve ever taken has taught this in some way. We’re given eavesdropping exercises, told to write what we see, write what we know. It’s the easiest place to start. Some writers spend an entire career there. But we are warned of its dangers. My playwriting professor quoted Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz this week, who said that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Any commitment to truth-telling risks slicing a community open too wide, too deep. But we do it anyway, for the sake of a real, good story.

Writing is ritualistic curiosity, it’s what the Journal, and all journalism, are devoted to. So, I guess you could say that we’re all just a bunch of sponges.