Why write?
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In the sundry interviews with Vladimir Nabokov collected in Strong Opinions, one learns a lot of trivial details about the man. One learns his views on tennis and on American hotels; his distinct aversion for swimming in swimming pools; his work habits and morning routine. Of themselves, such details are uninteresting. But because it is Nabokov, one reads on intrigued. From this fact I draw a tentative conclusion: The uninteresting details of the lives of interesting men and women are interesting. And this seems to me correct. If someone found an ancient parchment on which Cleopatra had listed her favourite colours, or an envelope on which Shakespeare had scribbled a shopping list, I would be very interested; at the prospect of discussing the shopping habits and favourite colours of my washing machine repairman, less so.
It is natural, meanwhile, for a man who keeps a journal to write mostly about himself—for the self is the only subject to whose mental states and experiences he has direct and privileged access. And it is obvious that, in writing, one is ipso facto committed to the belief that what they have to say is worthy of the effort of being written down and read about. We seem here to have a problem for journal writers who, like myself, are not the object of public interest. It would seem to follow that our thoughts and experiences can be of no possible interest to anyone and are therefore unworthy of being recorded. There are three things that need to be said in reply to this. I will produce them below in descending order of obviousness and ascending order of importance. The first: Something written in a journal may have literary or philosophical merit, and if so, its value does not depend on the private life its author. If a metaphor is original and arresting, it makes no difference whether it was conceived by Thomas Pynchon or Thomas Pynchon’s cleaning lady—and likewise for beautiful prose and insightful ideas and anything else. Nor, importantly, does the value of a good piece of writing depend on that goodness being recognized by others. (If a painting is beautiful at all it is no less beautiful because no one ever sees it). A lonely epigone toiling away in obscurity is therefore justified in so toiling—in the reasonable hope of producing something of intrinsic value. The second: Journal writing (quite apart from its literary merit or possible value to others) may be of immense value to its author by helping him to process his emotions, say, or organise his thoughts and make sense of his experiences. And whether or not his thoughts and experiences are worth recording depends only on whether or not recording them helps him in these ways. A man who labours over a private journal no one will ever read or care to read because of the psychological benefits of journal writing is therefore justified in continuing to so labour. The third, final and most important point was made by Frederick Buechner. In his autobiography he admits a certain embarrassment at writing an autobiography. “As if anybody cares or should care!” But he toiled on, he said, “because it seems to me that no matter who you are, if you tell your own story with sufficient candour and concreteness, it will be an interesting story and in some sense a universal story.” And then he concludes,
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And, after thinking about it—and somewhat to my own surprise—I must confess to a low but non-zero interest in the shopping habits and favourite colours of my washing machine repairman after all. I suppose that, sub specie aeternitatis, either everything in the universe is important and meaningful or nothing is.