The Point of Writing and Eternity

For likely 20 years now I have told myself that I want to be, and that I am, a writer.

This started with my first attempts at fiction when I was seven years old.  I would take my father's printer paper, remove the little hole-punched strips that adorned the sides, and create illustrated books.  I don't remember the content of those books, not really, but I remember being immensely proud and, what's more, thoroughly satisfied and happy during and after their creation.

Creation, though I didn't examine it so closely at the time, in the extension of the physical self into another physical self - the duplication of our own physiology (nerves, neurons, neuroses, etc.) to something physically resembling but not quite like us.  This is, in essence, what we do when we have children with the glaring exception being that we have more control over our creative expression in the inanimate than we do in the animate.



In most ways, we are not eternal even though we seek through various means (conquest, memorials, American Idol, etc.) to make ourselves so.

Our slights, kindnesses, and our wandering feet and hands, whatever they do, must turn back to the stardust from whence they came in the great gnawing nothingness of which we are so, so helplessly a part.

Yet through writing, perhaps, I can, through the most simple act of creating what was not before and what will not be, not quite so, in all history to come, extend myself beyond my own temporal aches and pains, discomforts and beads of sweat that go unnoticed, and create a more ethereal me.  A me that wanders happily, long after I as a being am gone, through the unknowable twilights and dawns of the lives of those I love, those they love, and those who are, someday, of those loves born.

My favorite writer, Jose Saramago, proposed that, "The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality."

Though, humorously enough, the sentence immediately following that wise insight is, "Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried."

So write.