Making art is making love. Each maker seeks a different sort of intimacy with a different sort of mate.
Some are specific and exclusive in their appeal. Nabokov intended his works to be difficult, to dissuade the hoi polloi. Joyce, Pound, and many moderns were aesthetic snobs, narrowing their readership to an abject elite.
Other makers are affable and inclusive. Shakespeare and Dickens are as gregarious as innkeepers. High-brow or low, you’re welcome to their worlds.
Some makers seek to awe with their brilliance. John Milton and Dr. Johnson are two of this type; Wagner in music. They seek your surrender, not your thoughts. Extol or to hell with you.
Other makers hardly know you’re in the room. George Herbert and Emily Dickinson, for example. They’ve left their door ajar, you can tiptoe in, but hush, they are at their prayers.
Others encourage you to be their chums. This is my cohort. Montaigne, Thoreau, Walt Whitman and Robert Frost invite you to join them for a bracing jaunt. They want to know you and you to know them. “I sha’n’t be gone long,” Frost entreats in one of our language’s essential poems, “you come too.”
Each courtship differs. Some seek sweaty grappling, others cool reserve. Some prefer delicate, others crude. Some readers like feeling overwhelmed, others object to subjection. Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson were both stay-at-home spinsters: Jane I feel like dancing with, while Miss Dickinson’s prickly privacy warns me off.
As a reader, I most love writers who look out for me. They seek to entertain, engage, entice, not awe or browbeat. They ask, they do not tell. They crave my approbation but if we’re not a match, that’s OK too. They resemble the bosom buddy I pined for but never found as a kid.
That’s the kind of writer I aim to be. If you’re reading this, we’re friends. I want to deepen our relation, know more about you, converse. If I write fancy, which I do sometimes, it’s with an eye to your amusement, to elicit a grin, not to flaunt. I share as much of myself as I dare, so you’ll reciprocate. Confidences beget confidences.
I’ve no agenda, no message or product to peddle, only to brighten our time together. “The only way to have a friend is to be one,” said Emerson (who could be pretty pompous at times). Friends lighten our journey; sharing consternation and sadness almost makes them pleasant. Misery loves company.
When I began these daily missives a decade ago, my readers were tangible friends; now I know only a small fraction of you face to face, but you are still my friends. With some of you I talk regularly, with many infrequently, but we keep in touch. When strangers ask what we jaw about here, my response seems evasive: “Whatever comes to mind,” I say, “the way friends do.”
Most of my life I hadn’t time for friends, I was too intent on getting somewhere. My friendships were organizational: school friends, work friends, tennis friends, political friends. Some of these friendships blossomed into intimacy, but I starved them, short on time. There’s no right amount of time to devote to a friendship. More is better.
Retired, with nowhere to get to, I’ve more time for friends. True, these friendships are lopsided, our encounters brief, five minutes or thereabouts, with me doing most of the talking, but if we meet every day, we’ll have spent thirty hours together during the year. Few of my live friendships occupy that much time, alas. We are all too busy.