Why bother writing?

Why do anything when the world is ending? Probably because you must.

I tend to write about despair every winter, and although this might raise some diagnostic flags, I think it’s more than the 5pm sunsets.

Last year I wrote about why anyone should bother with life despite the inevitable suffering involved, with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the context, this year about why bother writing.

As you might have noticed, I didn’t publish anything on my Substack for a large chunk of last year, because of yet another crisis of meaning surrounding writing. Probably because we were just dealing with another Most Important Election of Our Lives™ I feel a bit exhausted and overwhelmed by the world. Writing poetry or essays doesn’t feel important.

Jonathan Franzen describes my feelings better than I ever could in his essay, Why Bother?

I know there’s a reason I loved reading and loved writing. But every apology and every defense seems to dissolve in the sugar water of contemporary culture, and before long it becomes difficult indeed to get out of bed in the morning.

I struggle to explain to myself, let alone others, why I need to write my little poems and essays. Those things that I can’t communicate lose their meaning, especially when I’m struggling with feeling meaning at all.

I remember beginning my first notebook because I was a lonely child who didn’t know what i thought but felt things very deeply. I wrote because I was confused and knew as if instinctively that the page was the place for these confusions.

I am still often lost, lonely, and confused. Time and time again I put pen to paper to make sense of things and sometimes it helps.

My mistake has been to try to understand why I’m writing, instead of accepting that writing for me is an act of defiance and hope. Although much in my life depends on the outcomes of foreign wars, the whims of Washington, and the price of groceries, writing must not.

Again, Jonathan Franzen claims, “The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.”

A quick study on humanity’s obsession with apocalypse during times of unrest reveals not every disaster is an apocalypse. I think the trick at times like this where there is civil unrest, polarization, and every other Fox and NBC buzzword, is to live with the impending apocalypse and continue planting your garden, writing your novel, and falling in love with each other and the world.

I have no idea how to do this besides just to try. But every time I write, I chip away a bit at the part of me that steadfastly believes nothing matters. I think the most important thing is to release first your depressive realism, your steadfast belief, “that it’s the world that’s sick, and that the resistance of refusing to function in such a world is healthy.” It won’t save you and it will make your life pretty miserable in the meantime.

I’m not claiming you don’t have your troubles. I’ve sure as hell got mine but I think writing is the only way I’ll make it through the next 50 years feeling anything like a sense of purpose.

As I began to share my writing again through Substack, so many lovely strangers and friends were kind enough to share their thoughts with me. I truly treasure your comments and messages. They help cut through the darkness.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Romano Guardini, which full disclosure I stole from the beginning of Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman.

We know now that the modern world is coming to an end… Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another.