A businessman friend asks the goal of my Good Morning Project. He recalls one of my hoary bromides: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.”

I pause, puzzled. You might think, of an enterprise to which I’ve devoted the preponderance of my time for more than a decade, I might know the purpose. This is not just a lark (though it’s that), a frolic to amuse my friends. Neither is it a livelihood, though I chase it no less avidly than I did lucre. I’d liken it more to a vocation, a priesthood, something I do because, well, I just have to. I feel summoned – to contribute my words to a world already drowning in superfluity – not because I’ve a lesson to impart, like a teacher or prophet, but because this activity fulfills me like no other, makes me feel meant. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”; for me it’s I say, therefore I am.

Whacky, no? To a utilitarian, for sure: we’ve reasons to do what we do. A psychoanalyst might diagnose my writing as a response to my rearing, to allay old wounds. Others might read these missives as an “ego-trip” – Carll’s so sweet on himself! Others might explain my zeal as desperation to avoid the ignominy of anonymity. In each of these explanations, there’s some truth.

But none does justice to the pristine purity of my motive. I write because I love to, need to, long to, to share my wonder and woe, and to brighten, if only as briefly as a firefly, lives I love: not for fame or fortune, though I wouldn’t mind, but for friendship and fun; because exploring my world ignites it and makes it glow. Words tease, tickle, teach; taunt my insufficiency; dare me to attempt. I am happy here, dancing with syllables; I feel your warmth in my embrace.

That my words might “do some good” – clarify, inspire – is a secondary incentive. Who doesn’t want to help their neighbor? But I sense no philanthropy in my exertions. I am not doing you a favor, you’re doing me one, by reading me. My enjoyment is selfish and sensual, no sacrifice. I thrill to connect – at a level deeper and more revelatory than sociable chat.

I connect not only with you, who are breathing now, hours after I’ve composed, but with others unborn who may be navigating these periods when I’m gone. They may not exist – the chances of posterity’s attention are slim to none – but that’s more than I know. Just now I can sense them no less than living auditors. They’re as real as Thoreau was to me half a century ago in an empty college library, on a football Saturday, the rain beating down. I have them in mind, as you have me in mind – what a pair! – and their non-existence, if it comes to that, cannot make them less real. You all are my inspiration and redemption. You make my life worthwhile.

My need to connect grows more urgent, feverish, as the clock ticks down. I am, in both senses, running out of time. Any day now sickness will brain me like a slaughterhouse steer. And I will not have said enough – well enough. Jeez, got to book!

At present, I’m immersed in Beethoven’s biography. No space here for the thoughts that spurt from me like grease from a frying pan, just one tragic – ecstatic – note. Deaf, sick, grumpy, grim, Beethoven in his final years composed as much for his contemporaries as for everlasting soulmates. I know the feeling.