Hey friend,

                  I owe you a response. To the letters I most treasure I’m least likely to respond, for a response worth dispatching takes time and silence, ever in short supply. To the casual greeting I can grunt thanks – emoji for emoji – but words to you must beware blushing in retrospect. Accept my apology. No, you’ve not been out of my mind but much in, to serve as you deserve.

                  I have been well – enough for my purpose – which is to drive truth into a corner, though it slash and snarl. As the drumbeat of years amplifies into a sort of existential tinnitus, my desperation – yes, desperation – ratchets, to bail my brain before my body balks. Any dream of going “gentle into that goodnight,” seems not, alas, for me. I reflect often how frantic Proust must have felt, cocooned in his cork-lined room, to complete his impossible book! No such vast dreams torment me, thankfully – a miniaturist I, no prodigious producer – but the pressure to express never relents. Crazy, no? I think so too. I’m not driving towards some foreseeable attainment but am gusted by a relentless wind toward – who knows? It’s not recognition I seek, but realization of some grandeur I pray never arrives. 

                  How, I keep wondering, could Shakespeare have hung it up? After Prospero’s farewell to his magic did his soul shrug, enough’s enough? Maybe he was sick.

                  I attach to this belated effusion – which will run, you’ll be shocked to learn, six hundred words or so – a little book I’ve just finished, which I didn’t expect. My secondary school mates, many quite brilliant, have devoted the early years of their retirement to a brainy book club. They’ve urged me to join, but no one is less suited, with my finicky reading appetite which never knows what it craves. But then they asked me to present my own stuff to a session. Now you’re talking! Could it be my fellows from those four formative years might be interested in what I’ve made? I was ever shy, wary, clumsy at camaraderie; conversation seemed to shift at my approach. I took to music and writing, I suspect, because I didn’t know how to talk, really talk, beyond the deflections of politeness. Raised as mannequin, not man, it took me a while, fifty years or so, to crack out of the chrysalis of expectations.

                  Of my six million words – half published, half not – which might my former mates enjoy perusing?

                  The personal stuff. Maybe a selection of your favorite missives.

                  Favorite? Out of four thousand?!

                  I culled, intent. This was not any group of guys. This was the chummy crew whom for four flailing years I’d hoped to infiltrate.

                  I ended up making a little book which I did not expect – which I append – if you care to inspect – and if not, please, delete. It is either good or bad. Many books can be OK, all things considered. This book, if book it be, either works or flops – like a poem. I know of no OK poems, do you? Either they kindle – which is rare enough – or leave me cold – and borderline pissed, that my time should have been frittered on such twaddle. (Even Shakespeare had his off days – though him I give a pass.)

                  I envy you your adventures, all that art. If I wasn’t so busy, we might rejoin the pilgrimage, but perhaps it’s as well we can’t.  I write and write, but never enough. Not like Sisyphus, shouldering his rock, but like Tantalus, straining for that peach.

                  I look forward to seeing you in situ very soon. Love, C