Today's Revelation

Brought to you by Neil Gaiman.

"writing is, like death, a lonely business."

This encapsulates so much of what writing is about, at least for me. "A lonely business." There is something about that which is very, very true. You can share your aches and pains, complain about the blockages and the cramps, but, ultimately, it is something you do alone. A lot like aging. Like dying.

And writing is its own form of rebellion against death. It is our window, however transient and translucent, into immortality. Our way, as writers, of leaving a mark in indelible ink on the parchment of the world. For some of us, we do this consciously. We know, as we set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, that we are attempting to write our own legacies. Some of us do it for other reasons. To find out who we really are. To explore the possibilities and impossibilities of our world. To tell the stories and say the things that so desperately need to be said. But, underneath it all, we know that this is our trust to the people and places we will one day leave behind. Our bequeathal to a future that might otherwise never know we exist.

I see no shame in that. Shakespeare did it, after all. Keats. Shelley. Marlowe. Jonson. Wilde. Yeats. Eliot. Pound. Writers have written their way into the eternal, inscribed their names and beliefs on pages and stones for us to find. It is what we do. Because, like death, writing "is a lonely business."

I remember, years ago, working on my undergraduate thesis and coming across the myth of Thoth. Thoth - the Egyptian ibis-headed god of writing - was charged with finding a way to remember things. He invented writing and presented it to Ra. Ra was both pleased and angered. Thoth had done as he was bidden, but he had also contradicted those orders. With writing, what was could be remembered so long as it could be read. But so long as it could be read, there was no need to remember it.

Does writing mean we no longer need to remember things? Post-its, memos, and little check-mark notes in our PDAs certainly seem to indicate that memory has gone the way of the Dodo. We have things that do our remembering for us. But so long as we have those things, read those writings, we have the capacity to remember so much more than if we had to rely on the feeble weakness of our fleshly minds.

Do I wish I could hear a play and recall it, almost verbatim, a few hours later? You bet. But do I regret ever having the urge to read or write? Never. Words, whether engraved within the cellular matrix of my mind or written out - even on something as simple as a post-it - are the inky blood that keeps my psyche - my soul, if you will - alive. They allow us not simply to remember, but to grow. To take what our mothers and fathers have taught us and to change, to become something wonderful and rich and strange. Like death. A lonely business.