Through the past few years, I have passed some solitary hours musing on a metaphor that is a fitting lead to my long-delayed __th attempt at an introductory blog post. The metaphor is in the image of my bookshelf, viewed both in the light of what I have read and in the vaster, faster-growing shadow of what I have not. The metaphor, naturally, is for life itself. The enormity of the shadow is daunting, sometimes terrifying, when I understand it in terms of the library of books that I will never read. Unpacking the metaphor a little further, this library of Babel is itself relegated to an infinitesimal corner of a grid of shelves, spanning infinitely in at least four directions, from which one can see the flickering of the tiniest light, rendered visible only by the total darkness surrounding it.
The range of the possible lives one may lead is of course not a novel thought (and perhaps only expressible through metaphor), but it is a universe in which every writer understands himself to be and one with which every serious writer is forced to negotiate as a matter of course. I don’t mean to suggest that this scenario is unique to women and men of letters (indeed, there is perhaps nothing more absolutely universal), but this metaphor serves as a distinctly concrete reminder of the challenges and frustrations of writing. Most would-be writers long to find an output for our shared passion (i.e. the written word) as a consequence of the sustained pleasure over years we have enjoyed from its input. This makes us painfully aware that our contribution will be – could only ever be – a raindrop in the ocean. Again, this line of thinking is by no means the exclusive domain of writers, but it is the line of thought that has kept me sitting on my hands for the better part of… well, my life… and simultaneously the line of thinking from which I intend to distill (indeed, am distilling) this long overdue piece of output. With a little luck and a great deal more effort, it may be the thing that gets me off my ass.
How have I reckoned with the crippling plethora of possibility? Very poorly, for starters. It’s been at once the framework for my thinking and an omnipresent specter as I try to cope with life’s challenging decisions. It has prompted me to leave many stones unturned, many bridges uncrossed, and it has lead me down often tedious trails, even as I struggle to remain immobile, in endless anticipation of the deliverance that only the perfect road not (yet) travelled can offer. More directly, though no less cliché, I have squandered countless opportunities – academic, professional, romantic – in my effort to evade the necessity of committing myself to a choice – virtually the only necessity involved. If this seems paradoxical, it is. I doubt that anyone reading this has not found themselves in this Möbius strip of a mind frame.
To be sure, it isn’t always this dour. It’s not like I haven’t made any decisions or that all of them have been bad. But one obnoxious trend is that when I choose, I often choose the past of least resistance. I didn’t participate in any form of extracurricular activity in college (except, naturally, in the most literal sense). I chose not to study abroad in large part because of the work applying to and financing a program entailed. I left my interest in a lovely lady unexpressed for fear of rejection (alas, time and time again). More to the immediate point, I don’t want to write about people I care about if it means I have to write unflattering things about them. And, of course, the people I care about are precisely the people whose unflattering traits matter to me most.
That’s not entirely it, though. Another, far less universal, specter has been haunting the creative faculties in my mind: namely, that it’s not enough to want to be a writer, a true writer needs to write. This idea attained a new potency when I heard it uttered by Christopher Hitchens, who, his encouraging example in distrusting the whole notion aside, is a hero of mine. His words, both as example of and in deference to the great writers I’ve encountered, paired with my knee-jerk insecurity, left me feeling incompetent. Did I really need to write? Had I mistaken my passion for literature and relative aptitude with language – or worse, a desire to live the type of lifestyle various media had impressed upon me as signifying “a writer’s lifestyle” – for my life’s calling? To the second question, I am at a loss. It seems the answer will present itself only at the end of my life, and maybe not even then.
As for the first question, I no longer worry whether I Need To Write. A crucial step in unraveling the tangles of self-doubt was in recognizing that I had confused the compulsion to write with the act of writing itself. “If I really needed to write, why wasn’t I writing?” I wondered masochistically. Malnourished though it was (is), I have a faculty for writing that demands exercise, and I’ve kept it imprisoned for fear of failure and futility. I’ve withheld from myself my most cherished source of expression and I am a weaker person for it. True, this faculty may never bestow either fame or money, and it might merit neither, but those are lousy reasons for writing. In fact, they are fundamentally wrongheaded.
Even though I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t aware of this essential truism, it’s been very easy for me to conflate the Need to Write with traditional notions of success as a writer and use this as an excuse for not writing. It’s a tendency prevalent in more of my decisions than I’d care to admit: rather than take action in some direction and repeatedly, dishearteningly, and inevitably fail at this task, at the expense of all other possibilities, I choose to withdraw and await redemption from some ultimate sign that will point me toward the one, true path: a readymade salvation I’m perfectly aware does not exist in this world. (Not irrelevantly, I see no reason to believe such salvation awaits me in any other world, either.)
Another related paradox – or maybe it’s the same one – that I’m learning to accept and learning that it’s necessary to accept is that living in the present tense is not undertaken passively. My idle thoughts are filled with revised pasts and worry-free futures. In order to write, I must choose, moment by moment, to write and continue to write. Like everybody else, I get to make decisions and strive for goals and inevitably fail and second-guess myself and wake up and do it again. I know this. After all, I’ve chosen for the first slot on my Facebook’s favorite quotes [sic] list Samuel Beckett’s improbably inspiring “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Today, I failed better.
These words have been building pressure in me for some time and, happily, for some reason beyond my understanding, they hit critical mass today. Or, to put it more actively, I finally decided to translate my discontent into words. They may reflect unoriginal thinking. They may be the first drops of a storm that fall into the ocean and evaporate unseen a thousand times over. That’s okay. I needed to write them.
(originally composed 6/7/2011)
