“Latent in me, I suppose, there was always the belief that writing was greater than other things, or at least would prove to be greater in the end. Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.”
– James Salter, Don’t Save Anything: Uncollected Essays, Articles, and Profiles
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“I must write for the simple reason that writing is vital for any feeling of well-being. I have no marked desire to see my name in print, and I certainly do not owe anything to anybody. I can go on thinking and writing at a steady pace, and let the resulting material take care of itself”
– Eric Hoffer, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront
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Writing allows us to relive our lives, to order and reflect. As a writer I can play God. I decide what gets removed from the narrative. I have a monopoly over what’s left in
This practice is entirely self propelled. My words here are akin to a training log. I can look back and track my life through these daily efforts.
Of course my life is rich with other measures, not least my family. But writing is mine alone.
This is a record of preservation. Perhaps not produced for future study, but a daily slice of my thoughts and reflections.
When my memory fails and I hesitate to recall who I used to be, the confusion can be abated by using these pages to reconstruct my self.
Conversations With Quotations 