I am driven.

By what, toward what, I wonder.

Friends ask, “Where do you get your ideas? Every day – for ten years!” “I can’t stop myself,” I shrug sheepishly. It’s true. A day without writing I sicken; after two I grow grim, panicky. After more, I fear I’d – I don’t know what.

It is not so much what I write as that: doing is all I ask of myself, never to have done well, for that is not within my control. “For us, there is only the trying,” wrote T.S. Eliot. “The rest is not our business.”

I am not writing some big book. I love and revere various vast works – in storytelling, music, painting – but these are neither my inclination nor strength. I lack the patience to hew to a long trail. My nature, like puppy Henry’s, darts every which way, improvising. This hindered me in my teen years when I dreamed of being a musician. The first hour I would practice my assignment on the organ, fritter the next two improvising, then wake from my musical dream chagrined and unrehearsed.

With words, I seldom write more than fifteen hundred at a stretch (two and a half missives’ worth). Pause and my interest sprints after some new rabbit. The books I’ve managed to complete are mosaics of polished pieces, each its own excursion. This is not my plan, only what I can.

I do not write because I have something to say, but because I have to say something. Topics multiply irresistibly, I just open my eyes. When too tired to write, I go to sleep so I can write again. I read to write, live to write, love to write.

It is not, I’m pretty sure, worldly ambition that drives me. It once was: I slavered for Parnassus – or best-seller-dom, if I had to settle for less. No longer. If ambition’s driving me, wouldn’t my approach to writing be more strategic, deliberate, plotted? I write (this sounds crazy) to have written, for the pleasure of reading a pleasing passage and thinking, hey, I made that. I am glad if others share my pleasure, but that satisfaction is secondary. I write for me – me now and me later – a hundred years later maybe – as Thoreau, for example, once reached me across a chasm of time. I do not believe such posterity will transpire – the odds are infinitesimal – but that it might makes me smile. Emily Dickinson comes to mind – and Thoreau – and Melville – and other titans who died barely known.

My need is odd – but not that odd. Don’t many of us have some indefensible superstitious activity we mysteriously revere? We hear a lot these days about bucket lists – if I can visit these destinations, I will die happy: what’s that all about? Others strive to complete some difficult task crucial only to them. We may not be able to explain why we want these things, we just do. How many athletes keep “working on their game” without the least hope of even local eminence?

Such dream-goals mysteriously persuade us we matter. They also console us that, to the game of life, we’ve given our all, done what we could, so deserve to be greeted at our finish line with a warm hug, “Servant, well done.”

These days, I flatter myself there may be a need for what I offer. It feels as if we are at the end of literacy, civility, decency, common sense, sometimes civilization itself. If I can do some good in my little way, so much the better.