Chief among my life’s proliferous puzzles this obsessive need to scribble.

We write toward, of course, some dream of beauty; we write for – our readers, whom we love; we write to preserve the precious present from the slavering maws of time. And we write not to die.

No one wants to die. At our close we may come to accept that condition, even to prefer it to the pain of persistence, but no one seeks it. Since it’s inevitable and inexorable, the most efficient defense against death may be to ignore it. We live “as if there’s no tomorrow,” accepting extinction as we might any privation but directing our attention elsewhere.

Another defense is to disguise death as life – “life everlasting,” in one formulation. “It is so if we think so,” we insist, with the obstinacy of idealism – and sometimes, in radiant rapture, we may think so. I commend this escape route; occasionally I’ve glimpsed it like a slant of light; how adroit to sweeten the lemons of annihilation into the lemonade of permanence; but heaven remains folly to the sane. Dead is dead unless – gasp – something we’ve made lives on. Ars longa, vita brevis – Hippocrates nailed it – life is short, art long: not eternal – nothing’s that – but on the rarest of occasions, the next best thing.

Who has lived longer than Homer, Shakespeare, Bach, who affect us still? In the Metropolitan Museum, which Jane and I revisited recently, Cycladic images haunted us from three thousand years ago: a drop in the bucket in galactic terms, but as humans tell time, a lottery jackpot and then some. We don’t know the name of the maker who chiseled this back in the day, stone on stone, but what matter a name if one’s spirit transects millennia! Odds are a hundred billion to one – the longest of long shots – but not zero. And as the lottery slogan reminds us, “If you don’t play, you can’t win.”

I acknowledge the absurdity of any attempt to beat the universal rap. It’s not probability that seduces me, but possibility: as lottery players enjoy fingering the ticket in their pocket – don’t lose it! – so I setting pen to paper. I feel a little smug, too, about my membership in this secret sodality – call it the Emily Dickinson Society: she only looked like an uptight spinster scribbling in her Amherst bedroom, door latched, when – as it happens! – she was emitting her voice hundreds of years – at least, hundreds – down the echoing corridor of time. She knew better than to hope for such a result – she directed her trunk of poems to be destroyed at her death – but in the throes of composing she hoped even so.

There are plenty of present benefits to my obsession – and few drawbacks except removal from conviviality: one cannot write and chatter at the same time (though Jane Austen, we’re told, wrote her novels on a lap-desk in the parlor while her sisters babbled – how on earth!). Writing educates, tenderizes, humbles the aspirant – all welcome amendments in my case. It’s cheap and doesn’t give you a headache in the morning. It may form friendships you wouldn’t have enjoyed otherwise. It feels as if I’m fulfilling, not just filling my time, while I’m at it.

All good things, none pernicious. But the best – the addictive ingredient, I’m convinced – is the possibility of eternity. No one can hurt me if I outlast them all! To mean to some future reader what Thoreau meant to me – that’s heaven!

Crazy, no?