Writing is five thousand years old, give or take, humans two hundred thousand years old. So writing is still a novelty, finding its way.

We forget this. We extrapolate the familiar to forever. We fear an illiterate future. But for only the briefest sliver of time have humans been literate.

Why did humans take up writing? To remember. Writing was a container, a bowl to keep information from leaking away. Human memory is porous. The information in the bowl should be there tomorrow, even next year.

Writing permitted information to be shared – across space and time. We could send a message. We could recollect what our ancestors thought.

At first, sharing was clumsy, time-consuming. Only a few knew how. They shared what was most necessary: laws, prayers, favorite stories, contracts, so neither party would forget. As writing became easier, we invented new uses for it – to preserve our past, explicate our ideas, amuse or console ourselves. After the twentieth century, most people could write. Writing kept getting easier. Today you can write and send (and check spelling and grammar) without using paper or pen.

Three hundred years ago, privileged persons prided themselves on their literacy. Their ability to read and write distinguished them from those who couldn’t. Once everybody could write, writing became commonplace. To distinguish themselves, the elite evolved reading and writing inaccessible to the less educated. Highbrow became so high one could scarcely breathe. Complex texts made those who could decode them feel special. The few who could read Finnegans Wake or Proust’s behemoth felt like members of an exclusive club.

In any human endeavor, we welcome an exciting level of difficulty and recoil from challenges too easy or too hard. Think of crossword puzzles, backgammon, tennis, school: too easy bores, too hard disheartens. Any maker of art preselects their audience by the demands they make. I do not enjoy reading “young adult” prose: my brain doesn’t get a workout. Neither do I enjoy whacking my way through Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Finnegans Wake. They ask more of my mind and time than I’m willing to spend. To ask too much of one’s readers is to demean them: “you’re not smart enough.” As a beginner in literature, I revered Pound and the later Joyce; their inaccessibility made them gods in my pantheon. Today I abhor them. The nerve of them to talk down to me like that!

I write to a certain sort of person. (I’m talking about you here.) You are smart, curious, literate, humble, and busy. You enjoy language that is thoughtful, concise, gracious, and occasionally sportive. You’re allergic to showoffs, know-it-alls, and windbags who babble on. You take life seriously but not yourself. You enjoy a good laugh and are not ashamed to cry.

You are my ideal – who I aspire to be. I write so we can be together. I share what I think, never what you should, for I am sure of little. Friends like you are hard to find so I work hard to keep you. As Emile de Becque sings in South Pacific, “Once you have found her never let her go.”

Sometimes I show off, donning a disguise or parading a polysyllable, but always, I hope, with a wink: we are in on the joke together. I hope never to insult you with the obvious or obscure. I write what it would interest me to read.

I write to befriend. “The only way to have a friend is to be one,” said Emerson.  “Friends will not only live in harmony, but in melody,” said his friend (and mine), Thoreau.