'A Throb of Pleasure in His Heart'

“So, in a sense, you’re always writing for the future. It’s just that, when you do get older, the . . . future seems nearer. (Laughter) So, ideally, I would like to write for an audience who know the same things I do, and in fact, who have shared the same experiences I've had. (Laughter) That’s impossible; you can’t multiply yourself . . .” 

Ah, but you can. Like most other humans, writers are Heraclitean by nature, ever in flux. In the space of a sentence we can be two or three people. We may try hard to be single, to maintain the illusion of unity, but it’s a ruse. Think of novelists and poets who happily inhabit dozens of autonomous beings. Think of the salesmen who recalibrate with every customer who walks through the front door. We’re always more complicated than most of us understand. I’m no longer the guy who drank his morning coffee.      

 

The speaker above is the poet Donald Justice in a 1979 interview. Justice says he writes for the future. When an editor had rejected one of his sonnets, Charles Lamb declared to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” Both are correct, depending on the time of day. When I was in college, a lot of bloviation focused on the myth of the Ideal Reader. I recognized this as just another academic con job. Readers are real and we can’t presume to understand them or aim to please them. The best we can hope for is pleasing ourselves and serendipitously pleasing a few others. When Milton addresses his Muse in Paradise Lost, his stand-in for the Holy Spirit, he pleads: “Still govern thou my song / Urania! and fit audience find, though few.”

 

I started Anecdotal Evidence sixteen years ago, on February 5, 2006. No focus group was consulted and I had little idea of audience beyond the hunch that some people still like to read good books. I’m no critic but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for books, reading, writers and writing – things I already liked thinking and talking about. I’m pleased and proud that the first words posted on this blog were lines from William Hazlitt’s essay “The Fight”:

 

“. . . we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

 

When I look at the blog list to the left I see the names and websites of five people we’ve lost since this blog started – most recently, Terry Teachout. I’ve been blessed with some excellent readers.