Why I Write (Essay 8)

I write, most simply, because I cannot bear to be alone. There lurks just beneath the surface of my soul a constant shadow, a harbinger of the profound loneliness that is the human’s most abject and terrible fear. This loneliness repulses and attracts me; I am forever drawn against my conscious will towards its awful grasp. I reach towards its depth even as I shrink away, testing it as a child cautiously tests the monster under the bed with the gradual descent of a single bare foot. I write because I cannot accept the certainty that I will ultimately be consumed by its gruesome power, and the process of manipulating language provides brief respite from the terror of solitude.

Yet in order to write, I must stare into the fangs and jowls of the beast itself, and I must welcome its colossal chasm into my very being. In order to write, I must be consciously and completely alone. Writing is for the endless hours of the dark morning when there cannot possibly be anyone in the world as achingly awake as myself. It is for the nights when immortality seems the only alternative to suicide, and for the unceasing days that follow. Always there is the frantic battle against the certainty that the words can never be enough, and the dread that somehow they will be excessive. Thus the writer fears not obscurity, but greatness, for successful writing displays most poignantly the failure of all but the rarest words to convey more than base meaning. To write is to consume and become consumed by the insurmountable inadequacy of language and therefore existence. There is nothing beautiful about the process of writing; the writer will die by her task.

Still, what I so desperately seek and fear in this process are the occasional flashes of rightness, the moments in which the words together form authenticity. I am driven to order the words in ways that create meaning outside of my own isolated consciousness. I feel eternity in the words that I use; they are words that have passed from the pens of the common and the great, words that have been tasted by sinners and saviors, words that have danced in the dreams of toddlers and ancients. When I mold these words, I am merely a scribe, nothing more than a medium through which flow the past, present, and future of all of humanity. Beneath the force of language I cease to exist in my individuality and for an instant, I become everything that has ever been and that ever will be. It is an ecstatic moment of transcendence, one in which the solitary I is eclipsed by the enormous power of human connection. I write for that moment.