Our Happy Family
I have started reading the biography of Gustave Flaubert by Geoffrey Wall. It is helping take my mind off current events. Wall is an excellent writer and his work is thoroughly researched and very entertaining. I am discovering why I am not a writer by reading about Flaubert’s life. I hesitate to explain in detail, but a couple of observations stand out. I’m not as obsessive intellectually as Flaubert. Probably not as sensitive a person either. By that I mean I don’t spend hours and days pondering a single thought or emotion. I certainly don’t sit down and write at a pace of five words per hour. (I did previously mention that bit of trivia, but I keep coming back to that and marveling at how someone could approach their work so intensely.) None of this changes the fact that I love to write and I’m going to keep writing. I probably should spend some time learning some grammar, but I’m just not patient enough to do that. It’s fair to point out why I do this. It’s not because I have a readership that I am committed to serving. I don’t. In fact, no one that I know reads this stuff. (If you do, I’d rather you not tell me.) Someday, who knows when that day might come, someone might take a small amount of pleasure in reading these pages. I don’t spend a lot of time reading them myself, so that prospect is probably rather remote.