Words on a page perform two functions simultaneously: they convey ideas and refresh the spirit. We read them for what they say and how, their interest and delight.

Some words care only for their cargo of ideas. Hegel is my poster child for a terrible writer with a lot on his mind. Smart people assure me he’s smart; I’ll never know. No more would I converse with someone with fetid breath: life is too short.

Poetry, like painting or music, is not about what it tells us but how. Van Gogh’s sunflowers are not “about” sunflowers but about the emotional state his sunflowers evoke. We feel his paintings, we do not think them. Even when a poem seeks to inform or reform, it’s the music that beguiles, not the notions. Pope’s “Essay on Man,” for example, is memorable for its melody not its morality.

The success of words on a page depends on their aim. Storytelling authors should strive for transparency, so their tale shines through. Journalists or novelists who draw attention to themselves irk like bedtime mosquitoes.

Essayists use their subject, as Van Gogh his sunflowers, to express themselves. We do not read Montaigne to learn about ancient warfare, but to hang with him as he muses. Some of his topics are tiresome, but seldom the speaker.

I do not write to educate or persuade, but to enjoy our time together. I intend my words to be companionable, serious but not self-important, pulsing with affection – a sort of pristine lovemaking. Conversation is my anodyne for loneliness.

The beauty of words is little taught because it’s hard to explain. For Strunk and White, the arbiters of American prose in my generation, a sentence was a machine, built for speed and comfort. The music of speech was beside the point – and likely to interfere with a machine’s efficiency. Their tutelage resulted in a prose huggable as a machine.

I do not know how to write, I am always groping, feeling for language that might foster intimacy. Montaigne, Dr. Johnson, Thoreau convince me this can be done because they did it to me. My guide is the Golden Rule: speak unto others as you’d like to be spoken to, with courtesy, humor, concision, candor, affection. Folks who show off, bloviate or ignore their listeners’ reactions, miff and rile: ditto in prose. Prose, like food, is only tasty if consumed with pleasure.

Writing and living well are for me obverse and reverse of the same coin. The writers I love, whatever their oddities, are good people deep down. In person, they may have been obnoxious, but on the page, in their silence, they are lovable and loving. This is a controversial subject: can a despicable person produce beautiful art? – the Wagner conundrum. Too often, the demands of making countermand the obligations of being. To be a writer one must learn to slam one’s door.

What I love most about writing is its impossibility. Avid fishermen must feel this way: you wait and wait – and wait – for that tug that repays the tedium. If I make something nice, I grin like I’ve won the lottery.

I love, too, how writing teaches me. Words on a page insist on clarity of thought, which forces a writer to think and think again. Is this what you think, each sentence stares back, what you really think? Have you expressed yourself agreeably without trying your readers’ patience or wasting their time? Often I displease myself, which is educative too. It’s silly, I admit, but the challenge of writing makes me glad to be alive.