On Writing

From a letter I am writing to a good friend in Japan:

I’ve been thinking a good deal about the writing I do. We did a major cleanout of the shed behind the house the other day and found yet another trove of letters. I have kept hundreds of letters that I’ve received from friends (you, Karen in Australia, etc.), from family (mostly from my mother, some from my father), and so many of the letters that I’d sent home from Japan in 1982-83 and 1985-89. [These letters were dutifully saved for years by mother, who turned them over to me when my parents moved from New Jersey to Massachusetts.]

Over the past 45 years, I’ve written some 2,000 letters, and possibly even more, the majority of which are probably lost.

Then there is my journal, started in May 1982 on that first long plane flight to Japan. The journal is now over 10,000 pages, literally millions of words. I have all the books of the journal. It takes up quite a bit of shelf space. Nobody could possibly read through all this verbiage. Why would anyone go to the trouble?

The question becomes: What is the point of all this writing. Well, when I write to you, as I am doing now, you can choose to listen to me – or not.  But as I write, I slow my thoughts, engage my writing brain, and allow the rhythm of the pen to impose some order to my normally whirring mind.”

This is from pages four and five of what is likely to be a seven- or eight-page letter. My friend will receive my letter with what I imagine to be a mixture of mild anticipation and perhaps some dread about the letter’s length. Mark Twain is reputed to have said: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Or maybe it was French philosophe Blaise Pascal who said it. No matter; the point is made. Should I simply think my thoughts instead of spilling all this ink, page after page?

Maybe I have an undiagnosed case of logorrhea and just can’t help myself. I often think that if I wrote fewer letters and scribbled less in blank books, I might have published a real book or two by now. Maybe if I had dammed the flood of words in letters and (heaven help me) email to friends, and then in endless journal scribblings (to whom? my kids? posterity?), I could have channeled all this verbal energy into writing books that people would purchase and read. Since childhood, I fantasized about seeing my name in print and about being invited onto highbrow talk shows where the host would ask deep, searching questions about my writing. Never happened. Unlikely to happen in what future I have ahead of me.

But, Dear Reader, you have visited my blog (ugly word: blog? blob?), and you have read my words to this point. Or maybe you skimmed down to this paragraph where I address you directly. Anyway, you are here. Thank you for visiting.

Sometimes I read journal entries I’ve made years, even decades, ago. Some momentous event in my life: what did I write about it? As often as not, I am disappointed to find that I wrote very little. Or did not write anything about the event at all. I suppose I was too caught up in the events of the moment to take the time to reflect and write about them. The entries about meeting my first wife, a sudden and wholly unexpected event, are short and mostly descriptive. Same for my second wife. Not a whole lot to say at the time of mother’s death in 2013, or my father’s death in 2025. Sure enough, my thoughts often gestate over time, and later entries might explore my feelings. I will confess, however, that I am not apt to express my feelings, as if there is something suspect in feelings themselves. My wife Felicia, a deeply insightful woman who can peer down to the bottom of a person’s soul, long ago identified this trait in me: a reluctance to express feelings. Where she would very much like to know my feelings, I prefer to chronicle events.

History, the story of what has happened in the past, has always interested me. In history, we typically do not know exactly what historical actors were feeling when they acted as they did. We might know the externalities of why they did things but, absent their own records of their feelings, we may not understand the emotional energy that animated them. Besides, how accurate is a written record of an individual’s feelings? We can only surmise what they felt based on our own emotional landscapes.

Why do I write, even when I do not have anything particularly pressing to write about? I write because, in the act of writing, I put my thoughts and feelings in the harness of words and language. With any luck, I can plow the fields of my consciousness deeply enough to turn up something farther below the surface of events, perhaps even to reach the stratum of emotion. In my case, the emotion nearest the surface is anger, although I know that anger is inevitably energized by fear. In writing, I hope is to find kinder, less caustic feelings than fear and anger, and in so doing to bring closer to the surface feelings of joy, awe, tenderness, love, and hopefulness.

I guess that’s what Walt Whitman had in mind when, in Leaves of Grass, he wrote:

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

I write to “invite my soul,” but perhaps I should more earnestly observe a “spear of summer grass” and, in the act of observing, to discover something of myself.