Intro

Friends, I have to level with you. This episode almost didn’t happen. 

Partly, this is because I was miserably sick for two weeks straight. Partly, it’s because I habitually overcommit. But also, it’s because I’m having a kind of crisis of faith–one that’s got me doubting whether it’s worth writing this podcast … or even writing at all. 

Here’s where I’m stuck: We live in a world buried under an avalanche of content. More than 720,000 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every day. A new book is published every eight seconds. There are so many posts and tweets and comments that they seem to be unraveling our very ability to focus. Will making something new do anything but add to the noise? 

I know, I know … not really an auspicious opening for a podcast that is ostensibly a thank you note to the Universe. But, I’m not here to share greeting card platitudes. The gratitude’s got to be real. And right now I need to write my way through the doubt if I’m going to get there, if I even can. 

Batten the hatches, friends. We’re setting a course straight into the information hurricane.  

You’re listening to “I Heart This.”   

Power of Art (Narrative) Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The roots of my crisis run deep. They go back all the way to the summer reading list of a high school English class that included Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The drab paperback copy I had, with some forgettable landscape on the cover, didn’t seem like anything special. I expected more of the same of obligatory slog that I’d taken through the Heart of Darkness and Moby Dick–books totally wasted on my teenage mind. 

I actually did slog through Chapter One of Tinker Creek. It wasn’t a story! It wasn’t even a collection of short stories. It was a book of essays. Essays! For God’s sake, did anybody except English students even read essays? And why would anyone read essays about being lost and confused in some quasi-rural neighborhood in Vriginia which, as far as I could tell, was what this whole book was going to be about. Who gets lost in their own neighborhood? 

But in chapter two, called “Seeing,” Annie Dillard pulled out the rug from under me. 

“An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment,” she wrote, “He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to learn. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighbourhood, view the landscape, to discover at least WHERE it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

Annie wasn’t playing dumb. Her blinking confusion was genuine. She knew that she actually didn’t know anything about her neighborhood. That none of us did. And she wanted to cut the crap–to stop “faking it” and drop the “cocksure air.” The world was full of beauty and tragedy that we had somehow stopped seeing. We look at a tree full of red-winged blackbirds or a muskrat in the creek, but we don’t see them. Annie’s whole project was to get back to discovering “WHERE it was that she had been so startlingly set down.” 

This was something I understood. 

At the end of the essay, Annie relates the experiences of people who, by new medical procedures, had gained the ability to see after living their whole lives blind. Their stories ranged from inspiring to tragic to strange. Some couldn’t stand the overwhelming and disorienting new sense. One fifteen-year-old boy begged to go back to the “asylum” where he had lived to be with the still-blind girl whom he loved. Another patient couldn’t find her way around unless she closed her eyes and so, even though she was now sighted, voluntarily returned herself to darkness. Others describe their new-found vision of the world as an abstract and meaningless kaleidoscope of color. One patient expressed surprise that “men don’t really look like trees at all.”   

Finally, Annie wrote about, “a twenty-two-year-old girl [who] was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize the objects, but, “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’

After that, Annie commented, “I saw color-patches for weeks.” And after reading her essay, so did I. Annie made me want that! I wanted to see the world again for what it was, without the cloud of habituation. I wanted to shake myself awake. It’s no exaggeration to say that this essay instigated a lifetime of wandering my neighborhood trying to discover where it was that “I had been so startlingly set down.” 

The world was a mystery. But so was Annie’s writing. How had she so thoroughly changed how I looked at grass and clouds? These were just words on a page. Ink on pulped trees. But they moved me to tear up and laugh out loud and wander around my neighborhood, dumbstruck. 

The Power of Art (Exposition)

Reading Annie Dillard’s book was one of the first experiences of my life where I was aware that I was being transformed by art. I don’t think anyone out there would deny the power of art. My crisis of faith isn’t about whether art, in general, or writing, in particular, are worthwhile. I know they are. Art may not feed or clothe or cure the measles, but it is necessary. It addresses the human need for meaning and expression and for having reason to live at all. I am as sure of this as I am sure of anything. 

Maybe you’ve never even heard of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Maybe you wouldn’t even be moved by it if you read it. But I know that you’ve been touched by art! Somewhere, some human being made something for no other reason than beauty that cracked you open. Maybe it was a painting, a sculpture, or poem, but it could just as easily have been a flower garden or a movie, a rock n’ roll music video, or a comedy skit. 

Maybe you stood in Notre Dame before the fire and put your hand on a wall stone that had been placed there by another hand, not unlike your own, a thousand years ago. And maybe you couldn’t get out of your mind the kind of faith and vision it took to start a project that would only be finished by their grandchildren’s grandchildren. 

Maybe it was Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, whose characters found beauty and meaning in so much pain, and left you with the conviction that you could do the same in the hardest parts of your own life? Maybe it was Forrest Gump standing at Jenny’s grave telling her how proud she’d be of their son, “He’s so smart, Jenny?” Maybe it was Simone Biles gravity-defying floor routine that left you certain that even mortals could fly? 

Read through the comments of some of the millions of popular songs whose videos have been posted on YouTube. You won’t have to read long to find wellsprings of gratitude from people whose lives have been changed. “This song helped me live one more day, when I was considering ending it all.” “This song gave me the courage to take my life back from the man who abused me.” “When my dad died, this was the song that helped me find a way to live on the other side.” “This is the song that I listen to whenever I am missing the homeland that I had to leave.” “I listened to this song on repeat the night I got my diagnosis.” 

Art stirs our distracted hearts to compassion. What theater-goer could help but ache with Eponine in Les Miserables. She is “on her own” in the dark streets of Paris, but we are with her. Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, is a book written for eight-year-olds about a kid who is angry at the whole world over the loss of his dog, Sky, and the teacher who helps him finally express his grief. I challenge anyone to read it and NOT be moved. 

And who could help but laugh when the cast of SNL imagines a cold night in valley forge where General Washington rouses the troops with his vision of our new nation’s melting pot of … weights and measures. 

And even if you’ve never seen or heard any of these, you KNOW what I’m talking about. Something has moved you. You know what it’s meant. You know we need art in the world as much as we need houses, maybe as much as we need love. 

The Desire to Pay it Forward

My crisis isn’t doubting the power of art. It’s about doubting my crazy impulse to make it. For me, Tinker Creek was a lightning strike. I didn’t just want to feel its high-voltage power in my own life. I wanted to make something just as powerful. I wanted to light my own spark. And since writing was the medium that first touched the defibrilator to my heart … writing just happened to be the art I chose. 

The Rewards

Don’t get me wrong. There are all kinds of reasons to make art. It has its rewards. For a favored few, it can mean fame and fortune. For some others, not quite as few, it can be an honest living. And even when there are no likes to be garnered or pennies to be made, making beautiful things is inherently satisfying. 

I’ve chased the thrill of channeling a muse at 2:00 in the morning, scratching out words that don’t even feel like they’re coming from my own mind, my handwriting a nearly-illegible scrawl as I try to keep up. I’ve earned a regular, side-hustle paycheck writing magazine articles that helped me feel like I had the right to call myself a writer. And I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t entertained fantasies of hitting it big–being invited to speak at commencements or on NPR or having fans approach a fabric-covered folding table to chat with me for a minute and ask if I would sign a copy of my book. 

But mostly, I keep writing to pay a debt. My life is immeasurably better for the writers who, sometimes across the centuries, set my heart on fire with their words. I have no hope of paying them back. My only option is to pay it forward. Besides, what better use of a life than to do that for other human beings. It’s hard to tell you how badly I want this. Notoriety would be nice, and the delight of finding just the right image to vivify a story is sweet … but what I wouldn’t give to write just one poem … just one … that did to another person what Mary Oliver’s poems did to me. 

If writing really can inspire wisdom and wonder and compassion, then that’s what I want. Nearly everything I’ve written, this podcast included, I wrote with one hope in mind–to point out the mystery of this world we find ourselves in. And, as a corollary, to remind my fellow mortals, and myself, that appreciation is one of the highest callings of a human being. I wanted to celebrate the heroic task it sometimes is to remember that we are neck-deep in grace. To cut through the Hallmark platitudes and show that giving thanks and praise is a task worthy of our whole intellect AND our whole heart. 

The Costs

I have spent a lifetime trying–in spare moments between classes, in ten and fifteen minute increments clawed and wrestled out of busy evenings. I wrote when I should have been sleeping. I filled whole bookshelves of notebooks. Mostly with shit. Or maybe I should say mostly with sand–sand that I keep pouring in, hoping to form a few pearls. 

My work includes a few hundred poems. Like Emily Dickinson’s, they are full of em dashes. (Though hardly any slant rhymes. Sorry, Emily.) And like Emily’s, they sit in a drawer. Mine might be an electronic drawer–but still. In that same folder I have dozens of polite rejections from the likes of Poetry and the Sun and the Beloit Poetry Journal.  There are four and a half novels … I think … I’ve kind of lost count. Which I’m pretty sure is a sign that I’ve written too many unpublished novels. The best of which has even more rejections than my poetry. And despite my seventeen-year-old self’s skepticism of the genre, I can’t even begin to count the essays I’ve written. 

Writing is much of what I have done with my earthly life, now half over. I have quit good jobs to make room for it, foregone vacations, spent beautiful spring days indoors, and asked my wife and kids to sacrifice in so many small ways so that I could add a few more spots of ink to a few more leaves of tree pulp. 

Art has its rewards, but also has costs, some of them steep. Most of what it’s cost me is the only thing I really care about–time. What of the things that I could have done instead? What adventures could I have had? What friends could I have seen? What nights could I have danced? Do the rewards of sitting in my scribble den outweigh the costs? I really don’t know. 

The Uncertainty of Success

No matter what you’re after, (fame, fortune, legacy, personal satisfaction, or inspiring your fellow humans) success in art is hard. This isn’t news. But there’s a difference between knowing it’s hard in an abstract way and really grasping the devastating odds artists are up against. I think for the majority of us not destined for superstardom, there are these watershed moments when we realize just how hard it is. For me, it came one day, exploring the library at Mount Holyoke college. 

Libraries of the Unread

It was awesome. There were So. Many. Books. The shelves kept going, floor after floor. I would wander the aisles and pull dusty volumes at random. At some point I began to look at the cards in the little pockets inside the back covers to see when the books had last been checked out–only to realize that most of them never had. Let me say that again, most of the books in the library had never been checked out. Not even once. 

It was a sunny fall day, but I felt this cold, dark loneliness. I closed my eyes, and I could hear all of those unread voices whispering. In Sherman Alexie’s short story, “The Search Engine” the protagonist has a similar realization and wonders out to the reader. “What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?” Each book had been a labor of love for someone. Each one had been a sacrifice–not just for the author but also for the family and friends who had to give them up while they scratched away at the writing desk. 

Each book in that library had been a spark of hope thrown out into the night air. Only to be snuffed out by neglect. I wanted to read them all. I wanted to save them from oblivion. This was the first time that I saw the truth so starkly. Someone could spend a lifetime trying to light a fire in other souls, but end up as nothing more than a whispering ghost in the library of the unread. In fact, statistically, that was the most likely outcome by an overwhelming margin. 

Shouting into the Hurricane

Even this wasn’t enough to scare me off of the writing life. I am a romantic. I’ve had lots of practice disregarding statistical inevitabilities. Art has always been a risky business, no matter what you seek from it. But over the course of my life, I’ve felt the odds grow longer. I stood in awe of the hundreds of thousands of books at the Mount Holyoke Library. But they are nothing compared with the content-machines of the internet–YouTube and podcasts and Pinterest and Instagram–the floodgates of the firmament have been opened. The world is drowning with the outpourings of people just like me. 

We are shouting into a deafening storm. We are living in an art-typhoon, an information hurricane. The supply of art, right now, is endless. And as any freshman economics student could tell you, as the supply goes up, the value goes down. It is pointless to water your flowers in a flood.

And do I even want to any more? Look at what all this shouting has done. In any cafe or subway car, you’ll see the glassy-eyed look of people caught in the endless scroll. Consuming content. Growing listless on a constant glut of information. 

I want to make art, but I don’t want to be a part of that! I wanted to help people wake up. Not contributing to their anaesthesia. 

The Question

So … that’s where I’m at. 

With the costs so high and the odds so long. When the chance of reaching an audience is so slim and the possibility of touching hearts is so ineffable … How do we decide … How do I decide …  if this is worth my one wild and precious life?

There are lots of cases to make, but there are two that people talk about in particular. First, is it practical? Is it worth trying to make a living from the art? Second, if I can’t, is the innate satisfaction of creating enough to  Let me take them one-by-one. 

Argument #1: Practicalities

First, are the practical rewards of making art worth so many lonely hours at my desk? I can’t see any argument for “yes.” There is little chance I’ll ever make a living at it. Practically, my life would be healthier and more prosperous and probably happier if I just spent that time hiking, taking care of my finances, working at the job where I actually earn money, going for walks with friends, and playing with my kids. If you want fame, try reality TV. If you want fortune, go play the lottery. Your chances are better.  

Argument #2: For Satisfaction

But fame and fortune were never what I was after. So, what about the innate satisfaction that comes with making something beautiful? Is that enough? 

I’m sorry to equivocate, but my answer is “yes and no.”

Look … when the magic happens, it is sublime. It is intoxicating. You’re riding your bike home at midnight up the long, steep hill from your amazing library job, when a poem reveals itself like a light from the sky. If you were on a horse, it would have knocked you off it. You race home, desperate to find paper, cardboard, the kitchen counters, anything you can write on. The words bubble up like an artesian spring. You feel for a moment that tongues of flame are no metaphor! And when it stops, you lie on the couch surrounded by papers, feeling completely empty, but somehow yearning to be emptied again. 

Sometimes what makes art so great is the contact high. You feel echoes of the shivering touch of another artist’s muse. Once, several years ago, I discovered a video of a band I’d never heard of called Walk Off the Earth singing a cover of “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”. In less than four minutes, I was in love. Their vocals were passionate. The arrangement was an homage, but so fresh it felt like hearing it for the first time. It was all the things you wanted a cover to be. But it wasn’t craftsmanship alone that made me fall in love. It was the expressions on their faces and movements of their bodies. You could tell, they were having so much fun. You could tell, their music was enough, audience or no. Because they weren’t just making music, they were making joy. 

So, yes, satisfaction is enough! A thousand times, yes! I need no audience to sing in the shower. 

But  … art isn’t always like that. Especially writing, which can be more like scratching a statue from marble with your fingernails. Satisfaction alone isn’t enough to carry most of us through that. 

Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frida Kahlo’s Broken Column. Kurt Cobain’s Heart Shaped Box. Some of the world’s most powerful, most necessary works of art weren’t born of joy. They were born of anguish. You can’t tell me that these masterpieces were about satisfaction or fun … or even catharsis. Van Gogh didn’t find his work cathartic. He thought it drove him crazy. 

I aspire to write with joyous abandon. I want my writing to be a kind of play. But the truth is that muses are fickle, and writing often feels like work. So … what? … do I just stop and wait until it’s fun again? If I did, I wouldn’t write very much. So … art for the sake of satisfaction? Like I said, my answer is unsatisfyingly equivocal. Yes! And … no. I’m sorry, but that still isn’t enough. 

Argument #3: The Pearl of Great Price

But here’s the thing about art. It’s not about satisfaction. It’s not about you. Art isn’t a thing. It’s not a painting or a poem. Art is a relationship. It is the magic that happens between the artists and the audience through the work … that neither of them could experience alone. 

The artist’s drive isn’t for satisfaction. It’s for connection. 

That’s the source of my drive to pay the poetry forward. That’s why I want so badly “to press on minds the deepest mysteries, so that they may feel again their majesty and power.”  

Can I at least get that? 

For a story to be read. For its images to touch off little fireworks in the imagination of a reader. It has to be found. And this is where I despair. I know that there are other Harry Potters out there–stories as good as any blockbuster, stories that would capture the imagination of billions–sitting at the bottom some agents slush pile–lost in a tsunami of unpublished manuscripts–that will never be found or read or loved. 

There is so much chance, so much dumb luck involved, that even if I could write with the brilliance of an Annie Dillard, would my work ever find its way into the hands of the people whose lives it would change. 

And … at 46 … after half a lifetime of writing, I have to admit … that maybe I won’t. 

 [Heavy sigh.] 

And maybe I shouldn’t be disappointed by that. Maybe someone of greater character would face the possibility of this lifelong dream never coming true with equanimity. Maybe I should just be happy with the wonderful life that I have. It is a wonderful life. But I am disappointed. Looking at all those unread notebooks on my shelves, it’s hard not to feel like it was a waste. 

TFIOS

John Green’s, The Fault in Our Stars, tells the story of two teenage lovers, Hazel and Augustus, both dying of cancer. They face their mortality because they have to–because there’s no way around it when you’re seventeen and permanently hooked to oxygen. Late in the book, Augustus, who has yearned through the whole story to make some kind of difference in the world, is clearly near the end. He muses on how his obituary won’t be worth reading, how he thought he’d have a life worth remembering. And now, he knows that he’ll just be, as he later says, “another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.”

And you can feel Hazel’s righteous anger in her answer, “This is all you get! You get me, and you get your family and you get this world, and that’s it! And if that’s not enough for you, then I’m sorry, but it’s not nothing. Because I love you. And I’m going to remember you”.

Doesn’t that hit the tender spot? 

Maybe the only audience my novel gets is my kids when I read it aloud to them before bed. Maybe the only audience I get for my poems is some polite friends who humor me after dinner. Maybe all I get is a podcast that goes out to my family and friends. And if that’s not enough then I’m sorry. But it’s not nothing. 

Hope Lost

Of course, there is disappointment in losing hope, but there is also a kind of peace, isn’t there? You tried so hard … and then, you don’t have to anymore. You can finally let things be the way they are.

I may never write a literary thermonuclear bomb like Mary Oliver, but I have written little flashes of things that have lit the dark for a moment or two. I’ve been blessed to have enough talent and time to play with words all my life, and unlike so many writers, it hasn’t cost me everything. I get to live on this green Earth. I have a career that I love and a warm place to sleep and such wonderful friends and a family whose love surprises me every day … and I get to write now and then.  

And I thought that this was where this episode would end. With a sense of peace and a conviction not to take what I have for granted.  

But sometimes, “giving up” helps us see things afresh. And when I’d finally written my way out of hope, I went to my cousin’s wedding.  

Kara’s Wedding

It was a beautiful wedding. The bride and groom exchanged vows under an arbor on a hill that overlooked the treetops of central Massachusetts rouging with their first blush of fall. Kara and Justin had been together for years. They’d built a life and a family together. No one needed a ceremony to know that they loved and were committed to each other. 

My uncle, Jamie, is wise and insightful and eloquent, so it’s no surprise that they asked him to speak. And while the sun was sinking toward the western horizon, he talked about the power of making a public promise, to announce before the people who have raised you, “I will take this person into my family. They are mine, and I am theirs. And I will stand by them for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” 

Jamie pointed out that it’s the “poorer” that’s the hard part. It’s the “sickness.” Health and wealth are easy. And I thought of my grandmother who had passed away this April. When her husband had gotten sick with ALS and watched his strength and competence and eventually even his ability to speak unravel, she stayed by his side. She fed him when he couldn’t lift a fork. She washed him after he went to the bathroom. Until he died.

That’s love. 

Rumi says, “The price of kissing is your life. What a bargain; let’s buy it.” We love even when there is no gain to be had. We love when it isn’t fun, when it doesn’t feel good, even when it’s unrequited. Even when it hurts. 

And driving home from the wedding the next morning, I realized …goddamit … that that’s how I felt about this crazy, impractical choice to keep making inkspots on pulped trees that probably no one will ever read, and producing a podcast that maybe this month no one will listen to. I’m in love. I can’t help it. And I will keep loving this craft and the chance to say something meaningful even if it will never love me back. Even if all my words are just lost in the storm. 

In the end love is the only argument I have left for making beautiful things … and it goes like this. “Once upon a time there was a merchant who found a pearl of great price. He went and sold everything he had to buy it.” What a bargain. 

Rachel Platten

In 2015, Rachel Platten was at a crossroads. She had spent her whole adult life chasing a musical career. But her moment seemed to have passed. After a decade, she was still singing cover songs in bars and performing to sleepy crowds of a few dozen people at 1 o’clock in the morning. Now in her thirties, she was still lugging a keyboard around in a van. Instead of touring the world, she was touring house parties. What had she done with her life? Was her music making the world a better, more beautiful place? She had poured everything into this, and did anyone even care? Did anyone even want the music she had made? 

In her darkest days, she wrote a song as a kind of catharsis.  

Losing friends and I’m chasing sleep

the lyrics say

Everybody’s worried ’bout me

In too deep; they say I’m in too deep 

Maybe she should go back home, find a “real” job. She could have written a song about letting go and surrendering to fate, about the peace you can find in giving up. But she didn’t. She wrote a “Fight Song” instead. I know you’ve heard it. 

When Rachel wrote that song, she had no plans to perform it. It was for herself. She just needed something to light her way through the doubt. 

TV morning shows like to retell Rachel’s moment of instant stardom–how that song was played on the radio … how within days she had signed with Columbia Records … and how now she is an award-winning, multi-platinum superstar. It’s the kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy that people want to hear … one about someone who made it big after persevering. The kind of story that says all you have to do is keep believing in yourself and your dreams will come true. 

The hard truth is, however, that for most musicians who persevere through decades of lugging instruments to empty bars, there will never be a record label. 

What inspires me about Rachel’s story is not the well-deserved recognition that she finally achieved. What inspires me is her defiance. At the moment that she admitted to having lost all hope, she wrote a musical F U to fate. She taunted the gods: 

Can you hear my voice this time?  

and called out

I don’t really care if nobody else believes. 

Cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me. 

When you are in love, cost/benefit analyses are meaningless. For the pearl of great price, you risk everything, every time. In sickness and in health. For Rachel, it was music. And for me, it’s the written word. 

So … if all I get is to ride out and meet the blank pages of my next unread novel, or unlistened to podcast, then, right now, I’m resolving to do it with stubborn gladness. If this is love, I won’t hold back. This is my fight song. I will make you the most beautiful thing I can, even if nobody else believes. 

The Storm Revisited

So, now,  I’ve come back to the storm. 

When I stood in the library and imagined the unrequited whisperings of the unread, all I could see was the tragedy of being forgotten. When I looked at the immense outpouring of the internet, I conceived of it as a great hurricane whose floodwater made nurturing something beautiful seem futile and whose noise drowned out the voices that called into it. But what makes all that noise in the first place? It is, after all, just us. It is the anthems of untold millions, making meaning out of nothing, trying to make each other laugh and cry and feel compassion. Most of them must know that their videos won’t go viral, and their songs won’t become hits. But they make them anyway. 

That sounds like a storm worth joining. 

John Muir

The nineteenth century naturalist, John Muir, was a storm enthusiast. He couldn’t help himself. Even when hosting friends, he would grow restless with the rising winds, until he would eventually excuse himself with, “The pine trees are in ecstasy now, and I must go to them.”  

Then, careless of life and limb, he would run to the ridges for the best seat to the show. Sometimes, for an even better view, he would climb into the storm-thrashed trees. In one essay, he wrote about his exhilaration of grasping to the upmost branches of a Douglas fir in a powerful gale, “The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobo-link on a reed.” 

That’s how I want to live. 

Can I find it within myself to take the same joy in this storm? 

And what a storm it is! Look around! Little more than a century ago, no one did the dishes while listening to their favorite songs. If you wanted music, you had to make it by hand. To see a Carrivagio, you had to go to Rome. Now you can get a close-up view of the greatest masterpieces of human history whenever we want. In all of this empty Universe, we don’t know of a single story or song or garden … except here on Earth. As loud as our collective art-making might be, I’ll take it. 

If this is, as Hazel said, all I get, then I have been blessed beyond what I could have ever deserved. 

In the end, I can’t tell you if my writing is worth it. But I can tell you that that was the wrong question. The only wasted life is the one that hasn’t been occasionally squandered on beautiful, impractical things. I have no reason to keep writing except love, but there is no better one. This bizarre and wondrous world deserves hymns of praise even if no one ever hears them. The craft of arranging words to make pictures in someone else’s mind is a vocation worthy of the best I have. And if you are hearing this now, dear listeners, then I have you, and I cannot thank you enough. All of this has been for you. You are the culmination of a dream that I’ve had since I was 17 years old.