June 2010
For some reason I was moved to write on vacation this year. Most years I read, the whole family reads, from the crate of books we pack.
“Moved to write” is a fairly mild presentation of the actuality, I was compelled to write. And here are some of the fruits of that compulsion.
I am an editor by trade, not a writer. My time is mostly spent helping other people realize their visions and make connections in their own writing. My partner is a professional writer, my daughter has immense and quirky writing talent, and I count among my friends writers of all stripes.
I am, as those same friends will wearily attest, a talker. Discursive, associative, exhortative, political. These essays are a pretty good simulation of the riffs I’m apt to deliver to a willing or captive audience. It is how I think and what I think about. I’ve read enough to know the truth of Solomon’s pronouncement and many of these essays were written literally “under the sun.” So my apologies to all my influences, living and dead.
The late Nobel Prize winning author Jose Saramago kept a blog for a year. His entries were collected in a book called,”The Notebook”, which he ends with the following:
“You may find something good in these posts, and on that I congratulate myself without vanity: and others may encounter something bad, and for this I apologize — but only for not having written of certain subjects better, not for having failed to write of different subjects, since, if you will excuse my saying so, that was never an option.”
September 2010
Coda: It is now many weeks since I sat on beach writing furiously and freely. Since that time I have run head long into a possible explanation for my compulsion to write. I’ve experienced kidney failure, an entire week in the hospital, a diagnosis of bladder cancer, and the beginnings of treatment. It may be that on some level I knew I was ill and that on that subterranean level I felt as though my last chance to express some (my own!) important thoughts was at hand. That was not, of course, the actual case and here I am with even more fodder for scribbling. Illness! Cancer! What fertile and irresistible subjects for personal expression and thoughtful speculation. Who can resist the brave thoughts of someone staring death in the face? And what could I possibly say that would be the least bit new or interesting to anyone. It has all been said, done to death as it were, and though the experience is very rich, it feels silly to write about. That said I will try to capture something of the experience as I go through it though I hope I don’t succumb to the temptation of allowing illness to overtake the content of this collection.
