Ebullition. A talking jag. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

You find that weird? Me too. Where’s my muzzle for the love of God!

Self-expression is as necessary to me as other evacuations. I burst if I don’t. Daily. But why? I’ve pondered this mystery before and may again because it’s so absurd. Who needs to hear more from me? Not I! Why not take a walk, read a book, play with the dog, answer emails? Fix the light in the kitchen? (No, not that!) My queue of missives grows hoary waiting to greet the light. You won’t know I’m dead till months after, based on my missives’ persistence.

The usual motives don’t fit my case – need for income, glory-greed, a suitor’s sighs. No deadlines haunt. If you weren’t waiting, I’d be writing anyway – “to whom it may concern” – as Thoreau fifty years ago wrote to me. (A hundred and fifty years ago, by the calendar – but has an author written until he’s been read?)

Van Gogh painted like a madman his final weeks – seventy canvases in as many days – sprinting toward a finish he sensed approaching. I’m not equivalating quality, only behavior, this frantic need to say until one can’t. Chasing immortality? I doubt it. Any booby knows that nothing lasts long. Rather, I suspect, a straining toward the beautiful, an impossible perfection, that image of images, one word that cannot be unsaid. This vision, like the divine, is surely a delusion, but it’s more real than reality, as intensely enticing as sex to a pubescent. If only we could find our way there! While the clock clangs terribly – louder, louder – on an anvil in one’s skull.

I try laughing myself down from the ledge, like a kid in a Superman cloak threatening to fly. You Silly-Billy, come down you clown! I don’t mind the exhilaration, though it’s inconvenient, commandeering my time. There’s no more heroism in my avidity than there is in gluttony. I reread my scribbling and while not gold, it’s not dreck, so I press on.

“What is man but his passion?” asked my teacher, Robert Penn Warren, in his great poem Audubon, and, man, have I got that in spades. I love playing with words, as I do playing with Jane or Henry or my grandkids, only words never take a break, always a new notion or sound. I regret all those years knotting my necktie like a noose and heading to work. I enjoyed them too, but oh, what I might have made! Only, I wouldn’t have, I know, because to write one must live first, understand a thing or two, and about life I was a slow learner. “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry,” wrote Auden of Yeats. I know the feeling.

For many excellent writers, writing is a profession, the thing they do, which they like well enough, but don’t have to. They can quit writing without regret, do something else. For me writing is like oxygen to an asthmatic; I die if I don’t.

Younger I played tennis. I needed to do that too, not because I was championship material, just because – who knows why. Sickness sidelined me – to this day I ache not to be swinging – yet I survived.

Tennis, writing, and lovemaking have much in common. Sweaty grapples, they achieve little but the satisfaction of completion. We may feel, having spent ourselves, we’ve done something important, though we know otherwise.

Love is psychosis, no doubt, but of the most healthful sort. It makes us eager to live. It makes us small beside the vastest of powers and grateful for our chance.