Epigraph: No one with a sound mind goes into psychology. Which is why we’re all a little bit psychologists. Many of us — more than a little.
I woke up, got myself together, sat down at my computer as usual, and realized I had nothing to say.
Not laziness. Not fatigue. Nothing weighing on me. Quite the opposite: for the first time in three insane years of war, I felt completely at peace. The meditation practice — sporadic, guilty, thoroughly Western — had apparently produced a tangible result at last.
So. Write what, exactly? And why?
A book read by a negligible number of people, whose lives it will leave entirely unchanged — and thank God for that. The last thing I need is to carry the weight of someone failing to become what they were born to become, because of something I wrote.
A paper for an academic journal, which might — best case — produce a small ripple of discussion among two or three tenured eccentrics?
Post something provocative online and then sit back and watch the chaos? Small. All of it small. Vanity of vanities.
I keep wondering why Ecclesiastes bothered.
Was he trying to instruct his children? He surely knew that parental instruction slides off children like water off a duck. A mind like his couldn’t have missed it. Or was it simply that something inside him needed out? As someone once put it: you should write the way you answer nature’s call — only when you absolutely cannot hold it in any longer.
But if you can’t hold it in — why not? What exactly is creating the pressure? And if there is no pressure, if everything is quiet inside — is that good or bad?
Take a monk. A Buddhist monk. Better yet, a Theravada monk: Mahayana comes with a built-in obligation to drag the whole world toward enlightenment, whereas Theravada is essentially a school of cheerful, high-minded egotists. A proper Theravadin will help you if you ask persistently enough — or make yourself sufficiently annoying — but his real business is the patient cultivation of inner calm, the gradual extinction of desire, the end of suffering. Whether that counts as selfishness or wisdom depends on who’s asking.
So why would such a person write anything?
I can understand writing as a teacher’s assignment. But mountains of Theravada texts were written on nobody’s orders. Perhaps they were written by monks still on their way — pouring onto paper everything that stood between them and silence.
Among the founders of the great religions, for what it’s worth, only Moses and Muhammad are credited with actually writing — and both did so under direct divine instruction. The others answered their disciples’ questions, performed the occasional appropriate miracle, and delivered long speeches that diligent followers wrote down for them.
Which suggests that writing is usually a symptom of some internal defect. There is something inside you that insists on getting out and being handed to other people — because keeping it inside has become genuinely uncomfortable.
What a shabby business.
It bothers me, so I inflict it on everyone else. And there are virtual terabytes of this stuff. Kilotons of paper. Tons of clay tablets and stone stelae. The supply continues to grow. The age demands it.
I am clearly nowhere near perfection.
Look at all this I’ve written.
The morning had started so well.