A lot of the people who check in here I know are writers. But some
are not. Some are Internet surfers who stop by—one stop in their
never-ending search for something they’re looking for. The Internet is
like a vast sea of information, and everyone with a computer sails out
into it, setting their coordinates for one destination or another. Once
they get to where they’re going, they cast their nets out, and hope they
can catch that elusive
thing they’re looking for.
It may be an article about some subject they want to know more about.
Or a piece of music they want to hear, or a You Tube clip they want to
watch, or the address of someone from their past. Everybody’s out there,
tapping
their keyboards, surfing the Internet. Searching. I picture millions of
surfers out there, right now at this very minute, millions of people
casting their nets into the information ocean, all searching for
something. All hoping that the next click of the mouse they’re going to
find it.
It’s the same with writers. People think that writers know more than
the average person. That they have some special knowledge to impart to
the world, and that’s why they write. People think most writers are
experts on whatever it is they’re writing about. It may be true that a
writer may have more first hand personal knowledge of a subject. Like
Hemingway knew about bull fighting. And Fitzgerald knew about life among
the rich. “The rich are very different from you and me.” J. D.
Salinger, hermit/writer, knew the pain of adolescence and the insanity
of the world and how it can drive a sensitive person insane.
They know their subjects, these writers. Ray Bradbury remembered his
childhood, the good and the bad, and echoes of it can be heard in
everything he ever wrote. George Orwell knew the oppression of the mind
that comes with totalitarianism. Aldous Huxley saw the society of the
future as a place where humans were “decanted” and the population was
controlled not by brain washing, but by drugs and entertainment. These
writers knew their subjects well too. Or did they?
Somehow, I wonder. Somehow, I can almost picture them sitting at
their typewriters (a keyboard of an antiquated type) sailing out at the
midnight hour, surfing, not into an electronic sea of data, but into the
sea of their own imaginations. They felt close to their subjects, they
had a feeling for it, but to find a way to express it—that was what they
spent their lives trying to learn. Every sentence, every word was a
search. A search that sometimes took them to some strange places–some to
drink, some to suicide, some to a life with little human contact. But
in each of them the need for the search was stronger than the need even
to live.
They may have written about bullfights, or tragic heroes, or colonies
on Mars, but those were only the visible, comprehensible forms of
something deeper that they were all searching for and trying to express.
But what was it really? Something they may have occasionally only
glimpsed, something that always retreated back into the dark distance
the closer they got to it. Whatever they wrote, whatever the final
product, it never fully satisfied. Never really came close. But they
tried to get it down, as best they could. That’s what a writer does.
And so you’re out there right now, sitting at your keyboard, reading
these words on your computer screen. Trying to understand what it means.
Trying to see if it has any meaning in particular for you. Maybe. Maybe
not. Whatever it is, it’s all part of the Search.
