The Writing Gene
Atlanta, GA
November 22, 2020
Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living. – Flaubert
Last week I finished our uncle’s new book, and started his daughter’s first podcast, which she has ably written, produced, and read. As I did, I was reminded…and impressed…by the scribbling instinct that flows thru this family.
My wife calls it “the writing gene”. Before their latest efforts, my uncle and cousin had both written two prior books. That can’t be easy: choosing a topic, doing research, organizing thoughts, and capturing them in ways that inform, entertain, and satisfy readers. But they took initiative, and are emblematic of a more extensive, inherent family flair.
Another cousin…a winemaker of high repute…turns phrases as well as she blends grapes. Those who have sampled her wit admire how freely it flows, and appreciate that it is rarely kept bottled for long.
Her running accounts of her first pregnancy should be in the Smithsonian, to immortalize such pithy prose. Those updates were hysterical…and illuminating. They enhanced my admiration for women, and reinforced my relief to be a man.
For years, my mother has traveled the world, documenting her journeys with essays so charming and descriptive that the reader feels as if he were on every tour, enjoying each meal, and admiring every museum, church, garden, or castle.
That she and Jerry haven’t travelled the last nine months is almost as much our loss as theirs. They forgo the voyage, we miss the depiction. Through her captivating chronicles, we accompanied them not so much vicariously, as virtually. It’s as if we were there.
From my mother I inherited the proclivity, if not her ability, to write.
From the time I was a kid, I’ve had a desire to do so. With neighborhood friends I created makeshift sports “leagues”, as much to write about them as to play in them. I still have years of “newspapers” that document our youthful events, games, and activities from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unfortunately, some were irretrievably damaged by our latest basement flood. But most were preserved, and moved to higher ground.
As a young adult, I started keeping diaries and writing letters to report, record, and recollect. Much later, I was overcome with presumption, and began subjecting others to these effusions. Every once in a while (this morning, for instance) I sit back, and reconsider why I do this. Why jot down whatever inanities pop into my head, then share them with people who probably couldn’t care less?
Why would they? Nothing I write about is particularly compelling, unique, or unusual. Taking a walk in the rain, hanging preposterously from a tree, or sitting idly in a hotel lobby is about as edgy as it gets.
But perhaps that’s the point. My life is blessed with wonderful people, but from day to day is fairly routine. I paddle predictable streams, go with the flow, and make few waves. Yet every once and a while, I feel an urge to rock the boat.
Like many people, I crave harmony and abhor conflict, sometimes to my detriment. And, to the extent I withhold my thoughts, perhaps to the detriment of others. After all, even stupid ideas can serve as a warning, an inadvertent admonition to follow another path. But my natural inclination is to not pump more foolish opinions into a cesspool of silly ideas.
These missives might seem an glaring refutation of that assertion. But they are less a pump than a valve. They relieve pressure by releasing hot air.
It wasn’t always this way. When I was younger, there were no valves…and few filters. The pipes flowed free, often leaving a fetid flood of pompous opinion.
I used to enjoy arguments, even court them. Perhaps I did so because I was even dumber then than I am now, which made me that much more certain of my own sophistry. Some of my assertions found a forum in the university press, others on the public airwaves. Those were the years my family and friends would’ve preferred I wear a mask…not to shield germs, but to muzzle sound.
But, like most twenty-five year-olds, I’d eventually learn that the floorboards of my convictions weren’t as firm as I’d thought. As I marched assertively across them…with confidence, arrogance, and assurance…the flimsier ones would frequently fly loose, and slam into my face.
Our knowledge, as Will Durant put it, is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. The more we learn, the less we know. As I aged, and stumbled into enough intellectual potholes, I began subscribing to the notion that nothing is often a good thing to say, and frequently a clever one. No one ever listened himself out of a job, a friendship, a family, or a marriage.
So why, for much of my life, have I documented my ignorance, and inflicted it on others? Perhaps as a perverse way to keep me cognizant of it and, in years to come, to humble (or humiliate) myself as I reflect back upon these crumbs of error. Maybe it is to validate and epitomize Spanish folk wisdom, cada loco con su tema…that every fool has his ideas. Or, it could be that one day, in the serenity of old age, I can look back on the certainty of youth, and smile at the abiding arrogance of a spray of foam trying to assess the sea.
But, mostly, it’s probably because I simply can’t help it. I have the writing gene.
JD
