Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
I’ve often talked about being a writer. Or, to be more accurate, I’ve often talked about wanting to be a writer. This was the answer I would give when I was thirteen years old and people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and it’s still the answer I give now, twenty years later, when people ask (and they still do) what I want to be when I grow up. But, as is the case with so many dreams for so many people, I’ve never quite got around to making this happen. I’ve danced around the idea for a long time now, but never really dared to step out of the shallows, get my feet wet, take the plunge and write the things that I want to write.
Instead, I found easier, more comfortable ways to sustain myself on the edge of writing. I’ve studied writing, and taught writing, and written a lot about other people’s writing. I’ve kept journals, and diaries, and notebooks. I’ve scribbled thoughts, and quotes, and elegant turns-of-phrase overheard in cafés and on public transport on to whatever scraps of paper I had to hand at the time – napkins, old receipts, bookmarks, and (less romantically) my phone notepad – and stored all of these safely away for that one day, someday, when I feel ready to write something meaningful. Then, I think to myself, I will set these little gems into the bezels of my own words. “Then”: in that distant, abstract, nowhere-time when I’m finally ready to write something important.
All those notes are a kind of writing, of course, and although a lot of them are fragmentary, I have written plenty of complete pieces over the past decade too. In fact, I’ve spent most of my working time writing essays, research articles, conference papers, lesson plans, course programmes, and a 400-page behemoth of a thesis. All of this is writing of a kind, too, but none of it – not even the thesis that I dedicated so many years to – has ever really felt like my writing. In all of those pages (and pages and pages) I have shown very little of myself. Academic writing, by its nature, often seeks to obscure the author’s personality, preferring a facade of objectivity that (in the humanities at least) is rarely realistic, yet nevertheless often succeeds in sterilising a text, stripping it of its human identity. So, although I have written a lot, and made my way in the world this far mostly by writing, or thinking about writing, I’ve never really felt able to consider myself a writer. I haven’t felt like a real writer: a creative writer, free to articulate whatever thoughts are in my mind in whatever form feels most appropriate. This personal kind of writing is something I have shied away from, telling myself that I am biding my time, waiting for the right moment, the right circumstances, when I have the space, and peace, and inspiration to gather my thoughts and write from the heart.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an old interview with E. B. White in a 1969 issue of The Paris Review. In it, White speaks of the resoluteness required to become a writer. “A writer who waits for the ideal conditions under which to write,” he tells the interviewer, “will die without ever putting pen to paper.”
Death, I have found, has a particular way of focusing the mind. In the past two years, we have all been forced to look at the world anew through the lens of the pandemic. A large part of that has meant confronting the reality of our mortal condition in some way or another: whether passively, in the distant and impersonal tally of Covid deaths announced daily and repeated on every news bulletin, or in ways closer to home and altogether more personal. Many of us have experienced a bewildering something-in-the-middle. We have lost loved ones far away, been unable to see them in their final months, and then been prevented from paying our last respects in the usual, human ways. Anyone who has attended a funeral by livestream will know that death in the pandemic can feel deeply personal and unnervingly impersonal all at the same time.
Last summer, as I was finishing up that 400-page thesis, preparing to submit it online without having set foot in the university grounds for a full two years, and thinking about how strangely impersonal the end of many things had been in that time, my boyfriend introduced me to an app called WeCroak. On paper it sounds terrible: each day the app sends five randomly-scheduled notifications to your phone reminding you that you, one day, will die too. These arrive unexpectedly, and without sugar coating: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die,” the notification reads. Click on it, and it provides a short quotation – often literary or philosophical, sometimes spiritual, occasionally scientific – about the end of life. Yesterday, it sent me a quote from the 15th-century Indian mystic, Kabir Das: “Many have died; you also will die. The drum of death is being beaten. The world has fallen in love with a dream.” Before that, something more straightforward from the king of the Beats, Jack Kerouac: “I’m writing this book because we’re all going to die.” Some quotes are poetic, others are prosaic. They are impersonal in one sense (this is an automated app, after all) but each one fixes the mind on our very real, very personal mortality.
The inspiration for the app comes from a Bhutanese proverb, which states that to be happy one must contemplate death five times daily. The idea is not to evoke fear or dread, but the opposite: to normalise the inevitable, and make us more conscious of the finitude, and therefore value, of our lives. It is a memento mori for the present day. And it is strangely uplifting.
Why don’t we entertain this thought more often? We know that an awareness of our own impending doom is a great motivator and a signpost towards happiness: it helps us to whittle our life down to the things that really matter to us, and to invest our finite time and energy in the right places. When we lose sight of this, we waste our lives doing things that do not inspire us. When we keep our vision fixed and clear, we find the focus we need to live out our dreams. And why would any of us want to settle for anything less?
“When you walk more closely with death,” say the developers of WeCroak, “death keeps asking the question: Who do you want to be before you die?” The answer for me has always been the same: I want to be a writer.
So I am writing. Because life is short, and I want to be sure that I put my pen to paper before it’s too late. The conditions may not be ideal, and some of my thoughts may still be half-baked. But when the question is asked the answer is always there.
I want to be a writer.
So I am writing.
