Dear _______,
Herewith my letter of apology – profound, flushing, flustered – the no-kidding-around kind – yes, I’m ashamed – I’m suspending my subscription to your excellent newsletter and here’s why.
To save myself from drowning.
Six months ago, I commenced an experiment with these missives, to see if they might appeal to others beyond a narrow ambit of chums. I assumed they wouldn’t; my interests were too esoteric, my diction too fussy, my morality too scowling to find favor with a throng. I was curious – and self-defensive. If I died obscure (yeh, I’m feeling fine, but still…), at least I would have tried to salvage a future for my spew – and spared my kids the awkwardness of deleting the dad they’d just interred.
The premise of these missives has always been amiable, communitarian. I do not preach, teach, screech, but shmooze with a pal on our daily stroll. I write to make friends, for whom my appetite is insatiable. I don’t know why we exist but I’m sure it’s for one another. My readers buoy me with their attention and encouragement. I feel less alone.
The response to my invitation flattered but also flattened me. To multiply in half a year from 480 subscribers, paid and free, to twenty-six thousand and growing? And these readers weren’t casual or inadvertent: they read me, almost thirty percent on average, each day! They not only tolerated my moaning and meandering and moralizing and plundering bygone poets, they – you included – rooted me on – and many – more daily – sought to converse.
And I wanted to converse with them. Wasn’t that my premise – that we would share the quandary du jour?
To my first new readers, if they published regularly, I subscribed. Fair is fair: you read me, I read you. I enjoyed our back-and-forth. But then, yikes, I ran out of time. My inbox brimmed and slopped. My response to thoughtful remarks abbreviated to terse nods. I quit reading anything I didn’t absolutely have to so I could keep doing the work I’d committed to. I suppose I could have delegated or automated my acknowledgements, but that would have been to indulge in the phoniness I deplored, turning man into mannequin.
How to stanch the flow! Stop subscribing, for starters. Cancel all the automated streams I wasn’t reading. Your thoughts were worthwhile, well said, friend, but they didn’t make the cuts. I couldn’t squeeze them – or dozens of others – into my dismaying day.
Celebrity is the American ambition. But with it inevitably comes distance, posturing, positioning, branding, pretended intimacy. To one, I can be; to many, I must seem. I am hardly famous but better known – so far five thousand percent better known – the less free I feel to abdicate or alter the self I’ve shown. My dream of a readership is coming true and I am imprisoned in my dream.
Nice problem to have? My words are thrilled; they crave attention as dog-pal Henry does affection, the more the merrier. Their maker is restive. I’m not the kind of guy who enjoys slamming doors.
The solution to my quandary? Face it, confess it, as here, apologize, then do my damnedest to write to many as if they were a few. The writers I cleave to – Thoreau, Montaigne, Emily Dickinson, Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare, a galaxy of others – seem to be addressing me alone – their silence to mine – sensing my striving, dread, sensitivities, as only friends can. They trust me with their truth and I reciprocate. They entertain me – what are friends for? – but they do not show off. They are intimate with multitudes – how on earth!