An audio version of tonight’s Entrée is available at this link.

My dear Kirsten–

You once suggested that I write a blog explaining why I write a blog; I recall you suggested it as my first blog, but I think I have run out of other questions at the moment, and I want to avoid writing too much about Europe, so I think I will come back to it now.

I cannot remember a time that I did not want to be writing. As a child, I was always imagining, so imagining first games and then increasingly complex stories came naturally to me. For the past 40 years, I have generally fallen asleep to some story or other I am telling myself. When I did write as a teenager, the bad poetry and the stories became shorter and shorter—compressed. By the time I was in college, I was always thinking of short stories, and occasionally showed somebody else one.
Eventually, marriage, work, and academia came to exhaust my time, and I simply stopped writing.

The blog was a last ditch effort to try to start again.

I wish I could be content training horses, as you do, or working a little farm up in the mountains, or even gardening, but for me, these are just chores. I wish I could be happy only working in a bookstore, or a restaurant, or teaching, or baking bread; I love doing all these things, but they are just pleasant occupations. I enjoy spending my time with them, they relax me and refresh me, and I enjoy the company of others they offer, but my mind is drawn again and again to the world of words and ideas.

I love the way words feel as they flow off the tongue, and the way they look flowing across the page. I love the way words fit together, finding their way into a seamless weave in a well-crafted sentence. I love the welcome pain of beauty that clicks into the mind and the heart upon having completed a sentence or paragraph or phrase or story or lecture and just knowing it is right. I love feeling ideas explode when I read, and explode when I write, as if I am discovering new universes within a book or within myself. More than anything else, I love the moment of the gentle bond with some other soul as a phrase or idea connects, and for just one moment we are in the same place, together.

However, as far as writing goes, here is the problem, this has always been my problem as a writer: I can’t just write.
I am a conversationalist. I need someone to write at. I am happiest in conversation.

Not a single person who knows me will find this in the least surprising, but I really am happiest in conversation. I love the banter and give and take, the flow of ideas and stories and wit. I love telling my weird stories, and listening to the fascinating experiences others have to offer. Even in Philosophy, I see the whole enterprise as a long conversation going back to Socrates and even before; I love the banter of Philosophy and the ongoing shared examination of this big ol’ goofy world. I love the stories of the people in it—I love to tell them, and I love to hear them.

I both love and am pained by writing this blog: it gives me a chance to throw a just little bit of that conversation out there, but it is all terribly one-sided. A conversation without another voice is, “alas, like an ale without a wench, or an egg without salt.” It relieves the urge, but is still sadly unfulfilling.

You know I love you, gentle readers, but I do dislike the loneliness of writing.
Would it kill you to write back?