Why write? Why take the trouble? Why all this scribble, scribble, scribble?

It might be understandable if I had written from my early years but I didn’t. I read voraciously, almost anything that came to hand. I was hardly discriminating. I would sit at a table in the school library with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, scanning the pages for anything of interest, and I remember doing so many times — a welcome substitute for the indignities of the playground. But I never wrote anything beyond a classroom assignment. I kept no young boy’s secret journal, committed to paper no thoughts I dared not speak because, as I was often warned, a capital G god heard everything, even our thoughts.

In the course of my education I had some slight encouragement to write — occasional kind words from a teacher here and there, marginal notes on my scrappy paper, praising a choice of words, a turn of phrase or some well-put aperçu — but none of this turned into a drive to write. I certainly had no notion of writing for a living; no amount of praise could have planted the confidence which might convince me to turn words into money. Perhaps this was because I put so much effort into making money through ordinary labor; from the earliest age, I would do any kind of work to turn up a dollar or even less — I was ready for anything short of a war crime. But make money writing? I’m sure it never occurred to me. 

Over the years, there were plenty of things to write about because I lived an eventful life — not so much because of what I did but because of where I did it. My twenties unwound in pursuit of vague ideals, but then I settled down to the serious business of supporting a family, which was more readily done in the sordid but remunerative world of business. Until the middle of my working life, (I hesitate to say career), I worked in Asia, and then after twenty-some years on the far side of the world, the scene shifted to America, and it was only around this time that I began to write things down.

What prompted this? More than anything else, it was the presence of two little boys and the sudden sense that I must preserve their words and deeds, their first this or first that, or some specific experience that marked a moment in their little lives, some event that captured their flowering personalities, their wit, their wonder, the joy they spread around them. Some of these essays I actually wrote as if they were writing them down, putting the words in their voices and capturing on paper things that happened so early that they couldn't possibly remember them: a rowboat ride on a Tokyo lake with a water snake slithering sinuously across my oar; a boy’s first true bicycle ride, the training wheels now beneath his dignity; the sensation of holding a huge frog in small hands and feeling the tremulous beat of its terrified heart — and then setting him free; or a visit to a zoo in Hong Kong where a small boy, his heart already alive to the stirrings of empathy, sees two Manchurian cranes crossing their beaks in affection and he wonders aloud, if one dies, how will the other live alone? 

And now each of these two boys has grown and gone and started life and married well, and they each have two small boys of their own. These four little boys spread delight to anyone around them whenever they are in company, and also when they are far away, for software and devices make nothing of the distance and bring them right into my hand. The oldest boy is now ten and the youngest boy five, and much of what I’ve written down these past years has been with their older years in view. 

I confess I know little of my grandfathers, (one died before I was born and the other when I was eleven), and I very much want these little boys to know me. This is pure, unmitigated vanity. My brother took up genealogy as a hobby long ago and has researched our so-called roots, but the things he tells me leave me indifferent, Is this all we know of some ancestor — lifeless data and cold facts? Who would be satisfied to leave nothing more behind? Are grandparents to be nothing more than a few scant entries in a database — date of birth and date of the other thing? There must be something more, some artifacts to speak of a life’s adventures, a few accomplishments, perhaps even something on the outskirts of art. I tell myself I cannot know what these boys will think of me decades from now, but at least they will have some written things, available in small portions which they may consume a little at a time, so their appetite will not be sated — rarely more than two thousand words in a sitting and usually less. They may even enjoy this. Yes, it’s a reason to write.

And once begun, where would this writing end? It never did. It has gone on to other chapters. It went back to a time before the boys were born, a time of other earlier episodes that might now be examined with an older eye and perhaps a slightly wiser heart. In so doing I gained a better understanding of who I was then, a stranger in strange lands, callow but well-meaning. I captured a few of these scenes: a hot summer day by a lake up near the DMZ, sharing a plate of eels with a colleague from the school where I taught, and suddenly understanding that when he was just a boy he was already a veteran of war and scenes of death and destruction; a brief chance meeting with an old man, a calligrapher, and he showing me in a few swift, transient strokes how art can flow from brush to paper, catching a moment’s wit to last a lifetime; an encounter at a ferry crossing on a river bank far south of the Himalayas, where I saw the worst that poverty can do, a father’s cruel abuse of a child, and his son crawling along the ground, begging money for his family.

And there are still so many things to write about, things happen every day, but the question remains — why? The usual assumption is that writing must be published, shared with the wide world and commensurately rewarded, its value only proven by payment. Although it is true that many writers have been paid and even paid very well for their writing, I refuse to believe that their words were in any way enhanced by the payment. In a famous remark, Samuel Johnson expressed his view on the subject: “No one but a blockhead ever wrote for anything but money!” But I believe this was one of those things he said for effect and not because he meant it, and this remark would have fallen under his own Dictionary’s definition of banter or raillery.

There are, of course, many reasons to write that have nothing to do with money. Michel de Montaigne, having withdrawn from the world of public life to begin the work that would become his Essaies, certainly didn’t write for money, and he famously said, “I write to compose myself,” which was more than just a witticism. I believe he meant that the act of writing compelled him to question himself, and gave him a better understanding of his own mind. He also wrote because it gave him pleasure, and there are rare moments when I flatter myself that I have an intimation of this, the satisfaction of a well-chosen word, a shapely sentence, a pleasing paragraph. 

But I will note another motive, one given by the English novelist John Le Carré: “I write so that I’ll have something to read in my old age.” This, too, draws me to the blank page, especially because the far horizon is now not so far as one might wish. Even now, when I hope old age is still some time away, I look back at things I wrote before — some long before — and I’m surprised by what I see, and sometimes even entertained. To be sure, the urge to add more and make corrections (sometimes no more than typos or commas, for I’ve never had an editor) is irresistible, especially if it’s a piece I wrote long ago and have rarely read. But there are other times — and I wish they were frequent enough to satisfy vanity — when I read with real enjoyment. This is true of the essays I wrote elsewhere about walking across Spain — so much so that I’ve told myself not to look at them for at least three years, in order to let my eye improve and my sense grow more discerning. 

Just now, having read through what I wrote above, I tell myself that I should have started setting things down long ago, perhaps when I was still that school boy, sitting in the library wandering through the pages of an encyclopedia. That school boy should have spent some of his time, even just a few minutes each day, capturing his thoughts for his long-later self to read: what were the indignities of the playground?.... what were the thoughts I dared not speak?.... what kind of god was so unforgiving, and why should anyone pay him heed?

If I had fallen into the habit of writing down these thoughts, I might have worked my way to some answers earlier in life, and I might have composed myself a good while sooner.