In his 2006 “Best American” essay, Alan Shapiro asks us Why Write? Although his meditation is distinctly optimistic and highlights many personal reasons for writing, he has indirectly brought his reader into a larger framework of writing and philosophy. There are so many different reasons to write. For some, writing is an occupation. For others, a means to convey truth. It is both a social reform vehicle and an exercise in the arbitrary. It can be therapeutic, and it can be hell. It can document history, and it can cheat it. It can destroy. It can save. It requires both arrogance and humility. It’s a prison and an escape. But no matter the motivation or the even outcome, written word is an art and it survives. Even when the author doesn’t.
In her book Living By Fiction, Annie Dillard has this to say: “We lock in asylums those who see meaning in clouds and rocks…where do those of us who are not in asylums draw the line—by tacit agreement—between the humanly meaningful and the meaningless? Is the search for meaning among the high heaps of the meaningless a fool’s game? It is art’s game? . . . Do we ever discover meaning, or do we always make it up?”
So, why write? Maybe because you are that somebody that refuses to let seemingly insignificant moments slip into the “abyss of history” unnoticed. Somebody that won’t stop believing that words matter. A lot. And to all those somebody’s out there, thank you for your words. History has proved you are in good company. I think William Shakespeare would agree.
And let’s not forget about my other favorite William. He leaves us bloggers with most valuable advice: “It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase while the power is still yours. I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, then can become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity be burned to ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.” - William Carlos Williams
And it is in that spirit – with that sense of caution – that I begin blogging.
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