The Pleasure of It

1. A dirty little secret.Here is an admission against interest: if I want to keep something secret, I’d best post it on my blog. Because on any given day, I could fit my blog visitors into a hot tub. Which, by the way, I am keen to do. (If I knew who they were; my blog host tracks the number of visits to my blog, but not the identity of visitors.)

So I was taken back by a conversation I had with a friend. He is a lawyer, but he also is a philosopher by training. And he is a writer of (unpublished) letters to the editor. Sensing a Man with Things on his Mind, I solicited him to join the universe of bloggers. But he doubted that he had any recipe for a blog that would draw a hungry following.

A hungry following? Seriously? He says this to me, who, on any given day, doesn’t have enough blog visitors to serve as pallbearers at my funeral?

Yet here I go again.
2. For the joy of it.The point is not renown, but love of writing. I would write if I were a bearded hermit in a smoke-smudged cave, and I had to write with a bone and berry juice on skins of animals that I felled with a flint knife. I so love to write that I sometimes stay awake until four o’clock in the morning to complete a post.

I learned to love writing late in life. Starting in my fifties, I got excited about how some words mesh in a sentence, and I learned to enjoy manufacturing metaphors and similes. I now write with a thesaurus close by, to find the best word, and a dictionary, to make sure that it is the right word. I study what words are funny and what words are serious. (Pistachio is funny; almond is serious.) Late into the night, I read essays and books not just for the subject, but because the author takes me to school about the writing craft.

To say you will blog only if you know that you will attract a wide following is like saying that you will have children only if you know that they will grow up to be generals and senators. Accomplished offspring are a good thing. Acclaim is a good thing. But if fame never RSVPs me, that won’t shrink my joy in writing or burden me with a sense of failure.

It would be great to be a Joan Didion or a Maureen Dowd. But writing is like any occupation, pyramid-shaped, with the few and famous at the tapered top, down to the rest of us, unacclaimed, at the broad base.
3. For the future.But writing is more than pleasure for me. I never married, and I have no children; I won’t project progeny into the future. I can project my writings into the future, however. One day, friends and relatives might remember me by visiting my blog. My blog will reflect my personality more than a headstone over my buried bones or an ash-filled urn.

I hope that people will visit my blog at least until nobody lives who has a living memory of me. When I am dust, my writings might provoke a thought or two.
4. For the craft.I value learning the craft, too. Six hours writing an essay does more for me than the same amount of time watching television, a unhappy habit. Being a better writer makes me a better lawyer. And that benefits my clients.
5. For the children.And my writing could turn into a living legacy. Though I have no children, I have friends with children. I imagine one day sharing with them the secrets of writing an essay, teaching them to love writing at an age far earlier than I learned that love. If they learn to love it earlier than I did, they easily might surpass my abilities. And if someone someday were to compliment their brilliant writing, it would please me if my pupil remembered my role in making them the gifted writer that they became.
6. Joy for today, dreams for tomorrow.But in the present, I am glad of everybody who reads what I write. It makes me feel like the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass, showing his creations to Alice, proudly saying, "It’s my own invention."

And yet. Part of me hopes that my blog catches on. I even fantasize that a big-time website will discover me and invite me to post with them. And pay me to do it. As much as I love practicing law, I would be thrilled to earn a living by writing about ideas that interest me. We all have dreams.