One Option: To Be Forgotten

J. D. Salinger once told an interviewer about his many years out of the public eye: "I love to write, and I assure you I write regularly. But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it."

For writers, the option always exists to keep what we write to ourselves. We all do this to a certain extent. Not to the lengths that the great Salinger went, perhaps, but all writers share a common river of words: We just branch off in streams both discovered and hidden.

I'm aware of contradicting myself, here and elsewhere, about why I -- or anybody -- writes. Sometimes I say we have to do it. Sometimes I think it is to connect with others. Sometimes it seems as if no audience is necessary or even desirable.

After all, these are only words, and in the most powerful, militaristic, visual culture in all of history, how could mere words possibly matter to anyone?

Heirs will determine whether the public gets much more than a glimpse into Salinger's private writings, or those that survived his death and instructions, that is. From the point of view of the writer himself, that probably never mattered. He'd had his public moments, the fame and remuneration, etc.

There are those who write for these material purposes, and they are to be commended for it. I've often worked for pay; I continue to do so. This spring I have at least two magazine articles coming out -- two that I recall at this moment.

The editors were courteous. The process was professional. The result will be that my voice finds expression in two new titles from the hundreds in my past.

Long ago I stopped keeping track of where my published work resides, not because I don't care, but because I have no idea how to efficiently do so. For the past four years, almost everything has been in blog form, here or elsewhere, so it presumably will live on until the host (in this case, Google) chooses to remove it from the servers.

I don't have copies.

If, as a writer, you choose not to write, or not to publish, that is the option of providing an answer to the local museum promotion in the form of a question that I saw earlier this morning, whilst driving my soccer-playing son to a practice way across town.

I may not get this precisely right but it was something like this: "Is it better to be loved or hated rather than forgotten?"

Only the writer knows.

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