The Mismatched Tiles: In Defense of Incoherence
We are told, with the force of gospel, that our work must cohere. A piece of writing should be a single, flawless surface—marble, perhaps, or polished oak—where every idea settles snugly against the next. The reader’s eye should glide, uninterrupted, from thesis to conclusion. We sand down the rough patches, hide the seams, and burnish the whole until it reflects a singular, perfect thought. This is the editorial ideal: a monolith of meaning. But I want to propose a heresy. What if the most alive, the most truthful writing isn’t found in the seamless slab, but in the mosaic of mismatched tiles?
The drive for coherence, in its most aggressive form, is a drive for control. It seeks to eliminate the stray thought, the contradictory impulse, the emotional non-sequitur that bubbles up from a deeper, less orderly part of ourselves. We prune these away because they don’t ‘fit the narrative.’ But in doing so, we often prune away the very thing that gives writing its human texture—its friction, its surprise, its capacity to hold two opposing truths at once. A person is not a thesis statement; a person is a collection of fragments, memories, and conflicting desires that somehow, messily, add up to a life. Why should our prose be any less complex?
The Glue is the Ghost
Think of the tiles in an old courtyard, worn smooth by centuries. They don’t match. Some are chipped, their colors faded by different suns. The pattern, if there ever was one, has been disrupted by repairs. Yet the whole is breathtaking. Its beauty lies not in uniformity, but in the visible history of its assembly. The grout between the tiles—that which holds the disparate pieces together—is not meant to be invisible. It is the record of the hand that placed them there.
In writing, our ‘grout’ is the voice, the sensibility, the peculiar light of a mind through which all fragments are viewed. This is what provides coherence, not a rigid logical throughline. A reader will follow a winding path if the guide’s perspective is compelling enough. They will tolerate, even relish, a sudden detour into a personal anecdote, a speculative tangent, or a moment of doubt that cracks the argument open, so long as they trust the consciousness conducting the tour. The unity comes from the writer’s presence, not from the flawless ordering of points.
This isn’t an argument for sloppiness. It’s an argument for a different kind of rigour: the courage to leave the seams showing. To let the reader see where one thought ended and another, born of a different hour or mood, began. The essay that meanders from a critique of a novel to the scent of rain on a childhood street and back again may fail a logic test, but it can create a resonance that a perfectly structured piece cannot. It builds a world, not just a case.
So, the next time you’re editing, before you smooth out that strange, beautiful fragment that seems to belong to another essay entirely, pause. Ask not if it fits, but if it belongs. Does it feel true to the flickering, inconsistent project of being a thinking person? Your job as an editor is not just to construct a logical edifice, but to curate a collection of lived thoughts. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can build is not a monument, but a well-loved, patchwork quilt. Let the threads show. Let the colors clash. The coherence is in the hand that stitched them, and in the life that required their warmth.
Notes & further reading
A few pages I came back to while writing this: