Worth

I have a new favorite short story, "The Spade of Reason" by Jim Cowan. Originally published in Century 4, I found it in that 1996 Year's Best antho I've been reading.

This is a brilliant story. Stories like this one, and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture," and a few others, both inspire and sadden me. The inspiration comes because, upon reading such a story, I realize anew how powerful fiction can be, how transforming and redemptive. Words on a page can change the way I think. This is remarkable.

The sadness comes because I realize that I will never, ever write anything so wonderful. My mind simply doesn't work that way. I can tell good (even compelling) stories, but there's a point where I hit a wall, and I think I always will. I'm like the philosopher from Woolf's To The Lighthouse, who considers the range of possible human thought as a continuum from A to Z. He can think easily through the first part of the alphabet, and he can even make it as far as Q-- which is no small accomplishment!-- but beyond Q, he is lost. He will never even glimpse R. It is simply beyond him.

And yet "The Spade of Reason" is a text built on the backs of other texts-- Borge's "Library of Babel," the philosopher John Stuart Mills, and others. It is a story that could not have existed in isolation (unless it were produced as a series of random characters). This fascinates me. This process, this ongoing thing that is art, that is thought, that is knowledge.

Reading a great story (and I realize one person's "great" is another person's "boring," but for now that's beside the point) can be as mystical and glorious an experience as that of falling in love.

I'm not going to stop writing, though. When the writing is at its best, I sometimes create characters that are smarter than I am, and know things truer than anything I know. I sometimes write things more beautiful than I deserve to write.

Perhaps someday I'll leap (by some quantum event) to a level an order of magnitude beyond that, and write something that will live forever. Or at least deserve to.

All I can do is feed my mind, and think, and write, and never stop. I don't think you can set out to write a masterpiece. I'd go so far as to say that any attempt to do so is doomed to failure, because the work would be too conscious, too pretentious, too... I don't know. Too consumed by hubris.

Which isn't to say that masterpieces are random events. They aren't, of course.

This is all terribly complicated.

I want to be great, damn it. Is that an incorrect thing to say, impolitic? I want to be the finest writer of my time, but I won't be. I'll be good-- give me another decade or two of practice and I'll be very good-- but I'll never be great. My words will not live for centuries.

Maybe I'll be someone's favorite writer, though. Maybe I'll touch someone deeply, connect with someone in a fundamental way.

That would be enough, maybe. That would be more than most people are able to do.

I'm smart enough to know how smart I'm not.

I have enough discernment to discern the limits of my own worth.

This isn't exactly complaining, and this certainly isn't a bid for praise or attention. I know the worth of my work. I think I can even project the future worth of my work, in a broad way.

This is just... something I think about, sometimes. It's not as if I'll stop writing just because I'll never be the best ("best" is a slippery thing anyway, but I'm unlikely to make even the short list for that description). I won't stop writing unless I have an interruption in brain function. I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

This doesn't usually frustrate me. I'm a phlegmatic sort, I happily type along, I make up my stories, I debate the usefulness of passive voice, I get deeply involved in discussions about emotional arcs. Those things give me joy. I am a writer-- that's perhaps the only general categorization that I willingly embrace.

But oh, how I wish I could be, someday, a great writer.