On Writing

A letter. An arbitrary symbol, with an arbitrary sound. A word. An arbitrary string of arbitrary symbols made of arbitrary sounds; with arbitrary meaning. Sentences, Paragraphs, pages, etcetera. All arbitrary. Language itself has nothing that humans do not ascribe to it; and with all the confusion, what's really the point? Why bother writing? The point, is that it's arbitrary. It's flowing and changing nature allows language to grow, to be molded by every individual who wields it. It doesn't matter if you've been writing for a day, or a year. It doesn't matter if you use the biggest words or the smallest words; the most words or the fewest. What matters is that they are used. School forces us to write without a free hand, without a true command of the glory at our fingertips, and this frustrates many people. They decide that there is no reason to write. And that, is tragedy, a very vivid loss. When we write, we communicate something more than an arrangement of lines, more than fact, more than fantasy. We communicate ideas and feelings, the very things that make us what we are. And nestled in these communications we find the base of humanity, and we share it. We share what Hemmingway and Whitman and Hughes and Dickinson and Williams and an endless number of others have shared with us. Writing can find its way to the deaf or the blind or the mute. To anyone of any class and any gender and any race. It can be translated; and perhaps a translation will lose what you truly meant, or perhaps another language will cradle what you've written in a way the original language could not, and when someone else finds it, perhaps they will understand better than you could have hoped. In the way the strokes of a pencil or a paintbrush can create a piece, so can the arrangement of words; and in the way a dance or a piece of music can move a person to tears, so can a work of writing. Words leave an impact. And in the end, the softest whisper is as important as the loudest rumble, and then, it doesn't matter if a letter is arbitrary. It's become something more than itself, and it will always be something more than itself. And that is the point of writing.