How much life is too much?

By life I don’t mean existing. Existing, while the precondition of life, offers few charms. No umpf in the verb “to be.”

By life I mean engagement – with people, activities, purposes – the verbs join, play, connect – reaching out, signing up, lending a hand.

During our career years, this was no quandary. We were busy all the time, inextricably involved. We’d have been twice as busy if we had the time.

Retired, conviviality is our only utility. We combine for fun. We may support causes, but younger folks run them. Less and less are we are expected to “show up.”

This leaves us a luxury of what we call “free time.” No time is free, of course: every minute that passes has been deducted from our finite store. As fewer minutes remain, we may prize them more. As a boy I didn’t so much mind “wasting time,” I had such a trove. Now temporal profligacy enrages me, in life and art. Say what you have to, dammit, quit filibustering! (What “wasting time” means is another tricky calculus.)

If you’ve “nothing better” to do with your time, why not stuff it with life to the brim? I would, if that were my circumstance, but it’s not. The less time I have, the more I panic, as I used to on timed exams, scribbling faster and faster. I have so much more to set down, please don’t ring the bell!

Writing is the opposite of living. It requires solitude and silence. The composition of even a love letter is antisocial while the words form. Retiring, I worried whether I’d run out of things to say. The opposite occurred. The more I say, the more I have to, using “have to” in both senses. Knock off one notion and two emerge like the hydra’s heads, while the clock’s tick ramps to a pile-driver in my brain.

You might suggest – gently – the world hardly needs to hear so much from me, why not write a little less? I’d agree with you. My compulsion measures not self-importance but importunacy. Near his end, Van Gogh painted seventy oil paintings in seventy days. He just had to. At that point in his career, he’d sold one painting, so the demand was not market-driven. I’m not comparing quality here but urgency. Most days I evict myself from scribbling long after my muse has expired from exhaustion. It’s easier to detach Henry from a delicious fetid squirrel. Time away from my words feels weirdly “wasted.”

The more I write, the less I live. It grieves me I don’t get out more. I keep a list of buddies I’m determined to spend time with and it keeps lengthening. I shortchange Jane. “We can’t be hermits,” she says. “I know, I know,” I reply, “just a few more sentences.”

Am I nuts? Clinically, probably – and bless my affliction. I rush to sleep to rise to write. Henry, far from a distraction, I’ve recruited as my writing sidekick. Whether my words “amount to anything” is a matter of indifference. As long as you like them, what’s not to like?

“What is man but his passion?” wrote my teacher, Robert Penn Warren in a great poem. Passion I’ve got – in spades. But why? You might think this relentless self-scrutinizer might have a theory. I don’t, really. No more can I confidently explain my dreams. Any confident conviction is delusory – I know that. But what a gift!

This hurtling hurts, I miss my friends, but oh what a giddying ride. And lesson in humility, as if we needed another.