Everything Leads Everywhere

I have a weakness as a writer: I often like to write things just for the pleasure of seeing myself write them. I indulged this impulse freely in college, which is the first place I wrote even halfway consciously. My writing there was 90 percent inspiration and 10 percent perspiration. I'm sure it showed. But since many of my classmates were only semi-literate, my professors were, for the most part, complimentary.

I now think that all serious writing is about communicating, which has as much to do with understanding your listener as it does with understanding your message. The kind of writing I did in college -- and still gravitate towards readily -- isn’t really about conveying messages; it’s about displaying oneself. “Look at me jumping,” as Roo used to say, and as my father used to say too -- he was rather too vehemently opposed to children exhibiting themselves.

I don’t mind if someone wants to exhibit himself, but it tends to make for a boring kind of conversation. Oh, I suppose it doesn't have to be. Two bright people can strike sparks off each other -- the good kind -- by taking turns showing off their stuff. Isn’t that the essence of late-night bull sessions in the dorm? (Did I ever participate in such sessions, or is that a memory I borrowed from somebody else’s memoir?)

But for the most part it’s unpleasant to realize that the person you’re talking with really isn’t as interesting in talking to you as in talking to himself, with you as an excuse to do it out loud. One might wonder why that should matter. After all, it's just a question of motive. I don’t disqualify a writer from my attention just because he’s writing for money. Why should he be disqualified merely because his motive is to hear himself talk? Maybe I’m more like my father in this respect than I’d like to think. Or maybe I’m still the kid who needs to think he matters, which is a hard to thing to believe when you’re being used as a foil for someone else’s babbling.

One might ask what the title has to do with anything. I think the answer is that if you were to follow everything I’ve just written out to its capillary ramifications, you’d have a fairly good map to a big part of my psyche.