I am determined to write.

Books are my comfort object. I read incessantly, and I think it’s getting in my way.

I have a habit of carrying books around with me in my bag. This is a bad habit. I know it’s a bad habit because I bring them even to places where I know I won’t have a chance to read in peace like museums or restaurants. I tell myself that I can read when I have an idle moment. I have so much to read that I need to make the most of it. Why do I feel I have so much to read?

I buy lots of books, or I have many from the library to read for one of several book clubs that I’m in. The book clubs are a way to socialize, true, but they’re also a way for me to try to shoehorn in books I bought previously and haven’t been able to make myself prioritize. The problem with book clubs is I don’t unilaterally choose all the books. So then I have to read even more because the group doesn’t just choose what I have on my shelves. So that’s even more books to read. Why do I feel I need to read all my books?

My earliest recollection of this feeling back is from high school. In that instance it wasn’t a need to read all my books. It was to read “the classics.” I read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost then, and I translated sections of Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin class. I took Latin because I loved Greek myth as a kid and I wanted more exposure to source material; I didn’t understand the difference between Greek and Roman culture well enough to appreciate the differences - it was all Greek to me! But I picked up those others because I felt like I was behind. Like I needed to read The Canon in order to understand things well enough to participate in society. (I had and still have no pretensions to scientific or technical aptitude.) I needed to have read enough to be worthy of having something to say.

This feeling of lack hasn’t abated. Especially now that I’ve studied philosophy in school and continue to read it. The prospect of coming up with a new, original contribution is nigh impossible at this point. I know of many people, myself included, who report running into a problem and thinking they have an original solution only to find that someone else had the exact same idea hundreds of years ago. And that person explored the implications better and built it into a greater system, which just ends up awing you with your own inadequacy.

I’m not sure the feeling of lack is unjustified. We are born into and pass on from a world that is beyond any individual. It’s the source of admiration and ambition, and I admit to both feelings. As I’ve grown older I’ve tried to learn to appreciate instead of admire. Appreciation requires an equality and a healthy self-regard that admiration does not. As for ambition, I still feel this. I want to be great! I want to get my way and to make a name for myself, to accrue honors and riches. Since this one doesn’t seem to be going away I try to balance it out by distinguishing and prioritizing. I want to contribute to a world of ideas and letters; I don’t care about owning a yacht.

I can’t make that contribution if I’m just reading. I need output, not just input. Not that input isn’t a type of output, since selecting what to read is still an action with its own repercussions. Nevertheless, that doesn’t satisfy me. So I’m writing. Yet it’s just here on my blog. I know the folly of writing in your own little corner of the internet and thinking it matters. This is not how to make a mark, and I think I lack the credibility to publish in bigger venues. Even if I have the skill for it (jury’s out), I know extremely talented people who can’t get published for lack of credentials and that discourages me from trying.

Credentials here can be either some formal credit to one’s name that marks that person as an aristocrat, like holding a degree from a “good school,” or an already-established reputation. A person gets the degree from working within the system, like attending and passing classes on the way towards that degree. The way to get a reputation is to do work outside the established system that makes an impression and creates future opportunities to be recognized. The problem with the first approach is having the right degree for the right role at the right time; the problem with the latter is it’s necessarily extra effort on top of one’s normal occupation. Both are symptoms of a competitive drive to get the attention of an existing audience through one of those “bigger venues.”

Does that audience exist? It’s an abstraction, clearly. A presumed ‘natural resource’ for the writer to tap into and draw sustenance from. The audience for a work can’t exist before the work itself exists since the audience is defined by the work in question. So the competition is to create an audience. Or rather, to not need to create an audience. Because the promise of those bigger venues is that they’ve already cultivated an audience as a formal entity. And if that audience does pre-exist my writing then my writing could only be creating content to meet a certain form that can be provided to that audience. If I publish in that venue then it’s because I’m legible to be selected as fitting their form from amongst the other applicants, based either on my formal or informal credentials.

Is that a competition worth joining? The premise was that publishing in a bigger venue than this blog (or some other self-started publication) is the way to “make a mark.” I also noted that people without reputations “make an impression” on the way to creating that reputation which can serve as an informal credential. Is a large readership the way to make a mark? I don’t doubt it’s a way. Certainly it can be easier because it’s not “extra work.” It’s the conventional ‘paved path’. It’s going mainstream, hitting the big time, etc. Yet what is an impression if not a mark? Is making one or several impression the thing to do? Let’s assume I don’t have the formal credentials and so have to make a name for myself.

A single impression won’t satisfy me. I’ll only look back on it wistfully, recalling it as my ‘glory days’. Assuming the tact of creating a reputation is the way to go then I need to recall that the thing about making impressions is that they generally don’t pay. That’s because the writer creates their audience with each impression. I can’t make a living that way, and since a reputation requires a sequence of events in order to reach a wider audience I need to sustain myself over that long haul. So I get a day job and write on the side. Now that day job is taking time away from what I really want to put my time towards. Writing is a hobby. Or it’s building towards a career change if I’m lucky. Creating a audience and reputation already takes luck, so now I need even more of it: right place, right time, right people, to the nth degree.

Can I be satisfied with that struggle? At this point in my life I’m capable of appreciating the journey and not just the destination. It’s outstanding that I’m even doing the thing given it’s extra work to do. But I can’t disregard the destination. I have an aim. Maybe I’ll find along the way that the goal will change as I proceed. “Making a mark” is pretty vague after all. Contributing to “letters and ideas” is better but I also want to live long enough to tell the tale and that means making it sustainable. How on earth could I do that given my other time constraints?

I have to write (about) what I know. That’s what I’ve been doing here, splitting my posts between stuff at least tangentially related to my day job and my real passions. This brings me back to reading. I read, I learn to help me make sense of the world so that I can make a positive difference to the world. Flailing about is a very imprecise way of making that difference and is likely to fail. More likely I would be ignored if I was useless or even face stricture if my actions led to harm. At this point I’ve read a lot, and so while I don’t intend to stop reading I do intend to write and, with luck, I will create my audience. Maybe that will lead to a career change? Fingers crossed.

Here’s one last thought: what if I don’t actually want to make a positive difference in the world? Or at least, what if this binary of me and the world is a false one? Perhaps what I really want is to make myself different and making a positive difference in the world is only a consequence of that? Learning is, after all, just changing your mind, and reading and writing are fine ways of changing yourself while changing the world.