We cannot escape our moment.

Whatever we do is a response to it. To engage is a response; to distance ourselves also a response. We make only what our moment invites. Merry or moan, it’s our moment blowing through us.

I wake morose. Why? Aren’t the headlines cause enough? A vile inept leader is making a mess for mankind. We watch horror-struck as his tantrums trash civilization. Truth, beauty, grace – so easy to mangle, so hard to restore. Amidst such breakage, why bother saying? But if I do not say, what becomes of me? I no longer exist. So I must say – or vanish – as the widow graveside must weep.

I check my morning stats – how many clicks and likes and comments? My readers’ encouragement buoys me. So must marathoners feel about well-wishers as they approach their final mile: they can’t go on – no strength remains – but they must go on – for them! The desperate zeal of Pheidippides, delivering his message though it burst his heart.

Who would I have been in a different moment, in a different skin? What would I have had to say? There is a reason to read – to discover ourselves by comparison. How do I resemble Shakespeare, Thoreau, Dr. Johnson, Emily Dickinson, for example? We’re all human, for starters, addicted to the blank page, inheritors of the same tongue – but then? What did they make of their time? What might I of mine?

I listen for my marching orders. I might write anything this morning – why these words and not others? I sometimes gaze at my words and wonder, Where did these come from? I turned the spigot, sure, but what filled the well?

Necessity is the supreme blessing. To imagine ourselves needed plucks us from despair. I am not needed, of course, none of us is, but the delusion rousts me from bed, hastens me through dawn’s duties (coffee, dishes, dog), and plumps me onto my work-couch before an empty screen. I tingle to anticipate what my flickering fingers will produce, maybe today – finally! – something worth your while.

It’s a fantasy, you awaiting me, but not vanity. You were waiting long before you existed in fact. I needed to confide, as Thoreau confided in me, and my words, like Thoreau’s, germinated where they lit. So what the likelihood of this occurring is zero, the idea of it excites. You’re waiting, so I must speak, so no grumping. Get a move on, gramps – quit moping!

“The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express,” wrote Henry Adams. That is true. But this urgency is more than routine. I need to reach you, as a monk needs to pray. Without this purpose, my life would have no point. You, paradoxically, are my creator. As my teacher put it in his great poem,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published In that last summerI was almost ready to learnWhat imagination is – it is onlyThe lie we must learn to live by, if everWe mean to live at all.

(Robert Penn Warren: “American Portrait: Old Style”)

We imagine our significance. And that dream, like a potter’s fingers, shapes the moist clay of our days. And the origin of that dream is our moment. My moment conjures you – it is you I serve.

We mourn less the vileness of the world than a loss of purpose. If you fade, as you sometimes do, I deflate like a pricked balloon: why bother being? But with you there waiting, I must shoo sadness and get to work. There is always something to say – and here am I to say it. Praise be.