A fresh quandary: popularity corrodes intimacy.
I began these missives more than a decade ago to share thoughts with a few close friends. Lonely, I craved the comfort of companionship. I likened these outings to a daily stroll. We could kid, grumble, digress without having to introduce or justify ourselves. Occasionally my friends wrote back, but the assumption was always that they might if they chose. When we met, they’d often mention something I’d said, as if our conversation were ongoing, only occasionally aloud.
My audience grew gradually, a newcomer or two each week, whom I’d get to know. I could feel my readers beside me as we strolled.
Five months ago, I decided to test the attraction of these words to a larger audience. I did this reluctantly, to leave a tidier legacy and give my words a chance of surviving me. I never wrote for money – and never will – but this test required money, of which my supply was limited. I half-hoped my test would fail. My tiny contingent was all I could ever expect, “We few, we happy few!”
Jack couldn’t have been more surprised by his beanstalk. Not one or two new subscribers a week, but ten, fifty, two hundred a day. From 480 subscribers at the beginning of June to sixteen thousand currently and the pace persists. I was flattered, of course, giddied with glory-dreams, but deep down, I knew this wasn’t happening. Easy come, easy go. One day I’d wake and my new friends would have vanished.
As readers became less visible, it got harder to pretend we were chums. Hundreds each week would be meeting me for the first time. Some accepted my invitation of intimacy and wanted to talk; hurray – cozy familiarity had been my goal from the start – but yikes, look at the clock. I dreaded opening my inbox it was so crammed. “Nice problem to have,” friends smiled when I groaned. Maybe – but a problem is still a problem – and a quandary.
Three hours spent emptying an inbox are not spent exploring, daydreaming, reading a poem. Would my old friends feel I’d forsaken them to beguile strangers? I dreaded turning preacher, teacher, screecher to this expanded throng. My co-author, dog-pal Henry, wondered if he could still crack jokes.
I am feeling my way. I limit my email time, so many pleasant exchanges never occur. (To enlist an avatar would make me a fraud.) I write as if we were old pals, sadly accepting this as more often fiction than fact. I check with my longtime readers to be sure I’m not swelling into a public pomposity. I try not to grow cautious, especially when venting about the Nameless One, but this gets tricky: the bigger you are, the more tempting a target.
An age ago, when I was meandering America in an RV, running away from my life, I dispatched occasional bulletins to a small clutch of intimates. My beloved daughter Becca refused to read them. “I’m not one of a group, Dad, I’m your daughter,” she explained.
I learned. Love takes time – and if you don’t have the time, you can’t fake it. Many acquaintances equal fewer intimacies. I address you passionately, but spectrally, as Emily Dickinson did her crowd of readers, who had yet to exist. Can’t you feel her trembling, alone in her bedroom, wholly present yet absent?
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThis is my letter to the WorldThat never wrote to Me —The simple News that Nature told —With tender Majesty
Her Message is committedTo Hands I cannot see —For love of Her — Sweet — countrymen —Judge tenderly — of Me