“If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
~William James
Why write at all?
There are a number of mediums, inherently less navel-gazing, that provide space for human beings to scratch their expression-itch, their need to put form to feelings.
Painting, dance, sculpture, athleticism. These and more are available with built-in performative and instinctual moments in ways the quiet presence of a pen and paper, a keyboard and word processor cannot be. Communal and participative, these eschew the "claustrophobia of interiority" with which writing comes burdened.
Art forms like these aren't as prone to the epistemic confusion that has sundered the writing world with questions of provenance and methodology. Olympic traditions, museums of artistic glory, and fields of science and study back up to these practices and give them outlets, audiences, and a rich history of dramatic genius and beauty to enjoy and inspire.
So why write at all?
As writer Annie Dillard says, "This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else." Books and their writers have been banned across time and space as cultures found their ideas dangerous or uncouth. Plato mistrusted poets and thought writing brought about laziness, memory loss, and disjointed thinking.
But Aristotle, around 350 BC, said that to lead a truly good life it was necessary to be able to wield fictions, to imagine what might be or should or could, to see a larger reality within the one we inhabit.
So screw Plato.
Books have brought about more social change and inspired more social change-makers to push back against book-burning cultures than any other art form (simply trace the philosophical lineage of Mandela to MLK to Howard Thurman to the Easter tradition of spiritual texts).
And, in The Writing Life, Annie Dillard goes on to say that, "The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring."
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
~ Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
It's hard for the writer defend herself. So much time spent reading, sitting, conversing, and struggling to print a single finished page. There is editing, revision, and the primal tearing up of papers and too disjointed and incoherent ideas or chapters.
At work's end, little remains.
Maybe nothing does.
Here, allegations of romantic attachments and an egotistical self-image arise. Surely, the writer is a person deeply self-obsessed?
These are accusations to which we plead guilty.
To write and wish to inflict your musings upon other minds is deeply egotistical. Key traits of people defined as egotistical include, excessive self-focus, belief in superiority, difficulty accepting criticism, and entitlement. The case that a writer doesn't just typically possess these traits but requires them is closed and shut.
But as a self-obsessive, the writer knows one thing well. Through hours of toil with their tools and struggle with their soul, they recognize a truth that,
“The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.”
And in this, the purpose of our obsession, the unmentioned self-loathing and aforementioned self-loving mixed together, is where a writer's case is turned.
To write is to bring together the love of truth with that of the beautiful and the good.
As in any artistic or athletic endeavor, the true discovery is internal.
The pilgrim finds something new within and clings to it.
Purpose, fear, hope.
While one may run a race to feel God's pleasure or sculpt so that "marble and sculptor may totally coalesce", the writer writes to wrestle out of herself a way of being, a world apart, and a wisdom only lived.
We write to map and structure our inner landscape, a place of hills and valleys we obsessively commit to explore as, in the dells and coves we journey, we find the ground of all being waiting for us to tend its surface and root-scape with patience and devotion...
Is Life Worth Living by William James
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone
The Intellectual Life by A.G. Sertillanges