Publish or Perish

Having just committed another act of publication, I had that familiar reaction, a mixture of satisfaction and disappointment. I read the piece over, a brief review this time, and found that error, the result of a misunderstanding between me and the editor based on an ambiguity I’d introduced in the opening sentence. I think it was Roland Barthes who suggested that one of the pleasures of reading is reading our own writing. I agree with that up to a point. But there is also, for me, the disappointment that comes with seeing the thing in print, fixed on the page, finished now but far from perfect.

Over the years I’ve written a fair amount, and some of it has found its way into print. I sometimes think I should have written more and published more. I don’t exactly know why I feel this way. It’s just an affliction that writers seem to have, the desire not only to write but to publish and force one’s writing on others. I suppose it’s a form of validation. The printed words are one more proof of existence. Authorship lends a certain authority: the physical presence of the words themselves associated with one’s name printed out on the page.

And then there are tables of contents and indexes and bibliographies, further testimony to an author’s existence. They are all around us, these authors, living and dead, but mostly dead. They are shelved along with their works on bookcases. They fill bookstores and libraries around the globe, in nearly every language ever known. Wise and foolish, sages and dunces, authors of texts long and short, sit there waiting for us to come along and read them.

Print also confers a kind of immortality that is missing from electronic publication. Should the current be turned off, the flicker of electrons ceases, those words on paper will live on, who knows for how long. And when I am no longer among the living, when I am gone and mostly forgotten, some unsuspecting reader may one day pick up a copy of The Sewanee Review, volume 113, and find that little piece I’ve just published, and wonder what the hell I was trying to say in that garbled sentence in the first paragraph.