This is inspirational to me. It’s encouragement to up my game. In all truth, my game has never been very good. I am undisciplined. I am beset by attacks of traumatic emotion continually. I get tossed here and there, and I haven’t figured out yet how to make it stop. But I’m getting close. I feel it.
And I can’t help do what I do here, and what I’ve done on my other blog. Thinking, pondering, trying to figure out how humanity survives–or at least creating a plan which is in depth, sensible, and possible–is really all I am capable of doing. It is, obviously, my obsession.
But his comments on dealing with boredom and isolation, on attention, on being disciplined with time: all highly valuable for what I prefer to call a thought worker.
I actually took a class with Paul Griffiths at the University of Chicago. Along with the then Assistant Dean there, he is one of two people in my life who, the moment I met them, I could tell were significantly more intelligent than me. He probably has a 180 IQ and, as I think his letter makes clear, is still reasonably emotionally intelligent as well.
His last comment made me think of Charles Bukowski:
so you want to be a writer?
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you want women in your bed, don’t do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don’t do it. if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it, don’t do it. if you’re trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you’re not ready. don’t be like so many writers, don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don’t be dull and boring and pretentious, don’t be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don’t add to that. don’t do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don’t do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.