Manufacturing Yourself

            Hi reader, I hope you’re doing well. I’ve got a bit of a confession for you, reader. You’re the one that I write for, the only one I write for, and so I feel that I owe it to you to be honest with you. But how to say it? Let’s try this: I’m sure you know by now that I’m a person who has a lot of fears—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because when you’ve got a lot of fears you’re continually being presented with opportunities for overcoming them. Without fear we can never really become brave. But there’s one thing that scares me more than anything else in the world, and that’s writing. Writing scares me so much that it’s a struggle to make myself do it every day—because I care so much about it! How can I possibly bring myself to write night after night, day after day, wrestling with myself every day of my life? Why, I might write something that’s just terrible! It’s a daily battle, accepting that you’re bound to make mistakes, knowing that the only way to ever reach the pinnacle of the art is to constantly overcome your fear, to leap into your most abysmal failures with the same abandon that allows you to plunge into your greatest successes. It’s a daily battle, and a desperate one at that—after all, once you lose, once you let that fear take you in, all the victories of the past can start to ring hollow in your ears.

            But the fear of failure isn’t the worst fear. The worst fear is the fear of success—the fear of being unequal to your own successes. Because when you realize that you’ve passed the point of no return, when after a lifetime of searching you finally find the source of the stream that flows with sweet poetry, when for the first time it dawns on you what a terrific potency is in those Helicon waters… well, you start having to ask yourself what you’re going to do with it. Reading books becomes an altogether different sort of experience—all of a sudden, books become less like far-distant stories or idle entertainments and more like dispatches from a war. Every book becomes the record of its author’s internal conflict between the part that would use writing as a means for its own selfish ends and the part that would write disinterestedly, looking only to express truth and beauty in the words. And this war can become quite overwhelming. There are a handful of books, probably chief among them being Paradise Lost, that I’ve started numerous times but haven’t been able to finish because I couldn’t take the heat in the author’s kitchen. Milton was either a saint or a devil—all I know is that no normal human being could have written that book.

            But the thing that really starts to strike you, the thing that makes success even more terrifying a possibility than failure, is this: when you write a book, you’re not merely creating a thing like any other. It’s almost like you’re creating yourself for other people, like you’re manufacturing the way other people see you and think of you. People will meet an author and feel like they know this person very well because they’ve read all of her books—well, what if she’s been lying to her audience the whole time? The whole craft of writing is making a living off of words—that is, by learning how people’s thoughts and feelings can be affected by words… and the bookshops are full of brilliant writers who turned themselves into monsters by misusing that knowledge. The English Romantic poets almost universally interpreted Milton’s Satan as the true hero of Paradise Lost—and while this in no way degrades the excellence of their poetry, methinks we’d ought to ask a few questions about what they did with it.

            You may wonder why I’m telling you all this, reader… and I ask myself the very same question. Could it be that I’m trying to scare you away? Could it be that I’m trying to make myself out to be some kind of tragic figure? Could it be that I don’t trust myself, that I constantly question my own motives and that I’m terrified of the evil I could do, the hurt I could cause if I don’t live up to what’s best in myself? Could it be all of these things? All are possible. But reader, I think, I hope, I pray that by telling you what I’m most afraid of, by facing it directly and honestly… Well, I hope that bringing it out into the open will in some way defuse it. And I feel I owe it to you, reader, I feel I owe it to you to be as forthright and honest with you as I can be with myself. I may not be able to trust myself, but I hope to someday… what can I say, I’m afraid of my shadow. I hope to see you again, reader. Without you I wouldn’t be here night after night, typing, typing, typing. You take care of yourself, reader. After all, there’s only one of you!