A Legacy of Sorts

During a conversation I had recently with a friend, she commented on how much she used to like my newspaper articles. When she asked what I'd been doing since I stopped writing them, I told her that I'd gathered about a year's worth of those essays and had them published in book form. It was, I explained, my way of leaving something more tangible for posterity's sake, something more lasting than a trail of newspaper articles that would eventually get lost in some virtual and dusty archive.

This fits right in with why people write books in the first place: they either have an important story to tell, a lesson to teach, or a vital message to get across. And while a newspaper article can be pleasant to read, it doesn't, in my opinion, offer the same lasting value as do words preserved forever between two covers. It's no secret that some books are written purely for their entertainment value. The stories they tell lack substance and are designed merely to help pass the time on a rainy afternoon. Then, there are those books that teach and from which we stand to learn something new or be reminded of something we might have forgotten. As for poetry, they are paintings that use words rather than pigments to tell a story or to share the author's thoughts in a unique, lyrical and often highly memorable way, condensing often complex ideas into neat packages of symbols and mental images.

Essay writing, on the other hand, differs in that it generally conveys important truths or information either individually or collectively. A single essay can tell a small piece of the story, while a collection of them based on a specific theme expand and extend into all sorts of possible directions that theme might be taken in. Based on fact, essays not only share knowledge but broaden perspectives, and the themes of many are timeless and never lose their meaning no matter how faded their pages.

Writing is hard work, and the competition is stiff, given how the internet has opened venues up to everyone and anyone who can type a legible word. Bad writing abounds, but don't tell its authors that. For many delude themselves into thinking that contributing to micro-blogs at a penny-per-view makes them bonafide writers. Anyone can nail a few boards together into something that vaguely resembles a book shelf. But only an artisan can make that book shelf into something you'd want to preserve for all time. And therein lies the difference between writing and good writing, only there are exponentially lots more words to wade through than there are poorly-nailed-together boards before one reaches that conclusion.

So back to my own attempts at writing, humble as they are. I knew going in that there was a very good chance that I'd die before ever getting rich off them. And on that note, I take great comfort in the fact that many of the world's best and classic authors were long gone before their work made an impact. Names like Dickinson, Poe, Kafka, Hurston, Keats and Lovecraft are hardly to be scoffed at. But in truth, they all left bodies of work that would be appreciated only after their demises. That's a sobering truth indeed, and it leaves a writer, any writer, with a choice to make between hoping for some sort of tangible remuneration or writing simply to keep one's spirit alive long after the clock has stopped ticking.

Because writing, like any art, is an extension of the author's spirit. And writing, like any art, requires imagination that generates ideas, and when enough of those ideas have accumulated, they need somewhere to go, releasing bits and pieces of the creator's psyche in the process. This is easy to see in van Gogh's "Starry Night," where those twirling star vortexes adequately depict the painter's inner state at the time. It's not so easy to decipher in Toni Morrison's complex narration, but it's there in how she makes us dig to find its meaning.

So I hold in my hand a purple book that contains a year's worth of impressions garnered when I lived in the woods or some place that wasn't far from them. Hopefully others will hold their own copies, too, and I am going to try very hard to see that that happens. Not because I seek fame and fortune but because I'm in that book sharing what I've done, where I've been, what I've seen, and what I've learned, and I hope that readers are listening.


https://www.amazon.com/dp/1530989876