If these missives have struck you as inordinately self-reflective recently, it’s because their author is. I’ve been going through a weird bewilderment, a sort of spiritual climacteric, trying to figure things out.

Youth foresees clarity and serenity as one inches into antiquity. By age 74, shouldn’t you have figured out life’s big questions, especially if that’s been your focus? Lamentably and excitingly, the more I think, the less sure I get about why I’m here and how I should spend my remaining hours. The Nameless One compounds both my anxiety and confusion. The danger he poses to civilization haunts me. Like many of you, I long to be effective stalling and stomping on him and his. They are not a political movement but a vile disease, which threatens to obliterate the progress humans have made over the last six hundred years.

I also long to contemplate serenely this gift of life, to explore the beauties of the past and express my thanks. My soul is glad and my mind is mad. How to reconcile the two?

Precipitating my perplexity has been the sudden growth of these missives’ readership – from 480 dear pals on June 2 to more than sixteen thousand new friends today, increasing at a rate of a hundred or so a day. I never expected such spontaneous combustion. Extrapolate the trajectory and in months we’ll become a notable voice in our national conversation. Jumpin’ Jehosaphat! I do not want to be a public person, for that risks turning me into a politician, who must – to put it politely – “position himself” vis-à-vis the truth. All politicians lie to achieve their ends, some more, some less, some for the public good, others for private gain. A politician isn’t culpable for bending the truth in a desired direction, only for misleading malevolently, like the Nameless One.

I serve the Truth. She is my mistress, muse, mission. I love trying to say what I see. During my working life I was too busy and responsible to dare much candor, except in private. Retired, I am free to explore wherever my curiosity takes me and report my findings. I long to be Thoreau when I grow up. That’s preposterous, I realize, but as that great demotic poet, Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., put it,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedYou gotta have a dream,If you don’t have a dream,How you gonna have a dream come true?

If I permit myself to become a team captain in the anti-Nameless One brigade, I must obey my marching orders, support my confederates, temper my speech. The folks on our side in the Civil War must be Saints, on the other side, Monsters, which is nonsense, of course. To whom do I owe my life? To my urgent instant or my private dream? To activity or serenity? To the arena or my aerie? Am I patriot or poet? – for it’s hard to be both.

“Nice problem to have,” friends chuckle when I grumble. Only a problem is still a problem, especially if it’s tearing you apart.

I’ve decided to dismiss my dismay by deciding not to decide. (Say that three times fast!) Having confessed my conflict, I will beg my readers’ forgiveness when I disappoint. I will be guided by my moral compass, not my material ambition. I will not lie! – but I will bite my tongue, when I must, not to betray our cause.

All my days I sighed for the happy harbor of retirement, where I could bob in peace, questions answered and duties done. Turns out the harbor is a war zone. Oh well. You play the hand you’ve been dealt.